Temporal Lorentzian spectral triples

Abstract

We present the notion of temporal Lorentzian spectral triple which is an extension of the notion of pseudo-Riemannian spectral triple with a way to ensure that the signature of the metric is Lorentzian. A temporal Lorentzian spectral triple corresponds to a specific 3 + 1 decomposition of a possibly noncommutative Lorentzian space. This structure introduces a notion of global time in noncommutative geometry. As an example, we construct a temporal Lorentzian spectral triple over a Moyal–Minkowski spacetime. We show that, when time is commutative, the algebra can be extended to unbounded elements. Using such an extension, it is possible to define a Lorentzian distance formula between pure states with a well-defined noncommutative formulation.