Noncommutative Geometry Seminar

Date: September 24, 2021

Time: 2:00PM - 3:00PM

Location: ZOOM

Speaker: Marc Rieffel , University of California at Berkeley

Title: Dirac Operators for Matrix Algebras Converging to Coadjoint Orbits

Abstract: In the high-energy physics literature one finds statements such as “matrix algebras converge to the sphere”. Earlier I provided a general precise setting for understanding such statements, in which the matrix algebras are viewed as C*-metric spaces, and convergence is with respect to a quantum Gromov-Hausdorff-type distance. But physicists want even more to treat structures on spheres (and other spaces like coadjoint orbits), such as vector bundles, Yang-Mills functionals, Dirac operators, etc., and they want to approximate these by corresponding structures on matrix algebras. I will sketch a somewhat unified construction of Dirac operators on coadjoint orbits and on the matrix algebras that converge to them. As Connes showed us, from Dirac operators we may obtain C*-metrics. Our unified construction enables us to prove our main theorem, whose content is that, for the C*-metric-space structures determined by the Dirac operators that we construct, the matrix algebras do indeed converge to the coadjoint orbits, for a quite strong version of quantum Gromov-Hausdorff distance. This is a long story, but I will sketch how it works.