Families of spectral triples and foliations of space(time)

Abstract

We study a noncommutative analog of a spacetime foliated by spacelike hypersurfaces, in both Riemannian and Lorentzian signatures. First, in the classical commutative case, we show that the canonical Dirac operator on the total spacetime can be reconstructed from the family of Dirac operators on the hypersurfaces. Second, in the noncommutative case, the same construction continues to make sense for an abstract family of spectral triples. In the case of Riemannian signature, we prove that the construction yields in fact a spectral triple, which we call a product spectral triple. In the case of Lorentzian signature, we correspondingly obtain a “Lorentzian spectral triple,” which can also be viewed as the “reverse Wick rotation” of a product spectral triple. This construction of “Lorentzian spectral triples” fits well into the Krein space approach to noncommutative Lorentzian geometry.