The one-parameter family of Dirac operators containing the Levi-Civita, cubic, and the trivial Dirac operators on a compact Lie group is analyzed. The spectra for the one-parameter family of Dirac Laplacians on SU(2) and SU(3) are computed by considering a diagonally embedded Casimir operator. Then the asymptotic expansions of the spectral actions for SU(2) and SU(3) are computed, using the Poisson summation formula and the two-dimensional Euler-Maclaurin formula, respectively. The inflation potential and slow-roll parameters for the corresponding pure gravity inflationary theory are generated, using the full asymptotic expansion of the spectral action on SU(2). C 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4790484]
I. INTRODUCTIONOn a compact Lie group, one may naturally associate a one-parameter family of Dirac operators by interpolating the torsion of a connection given by the Lie bracket. This family of Dirac operators, is parametrized by a real parameter, t. For t = 1/2 one obtains the geometric spin Dirac operator, algebraic cubic Dirac operator of Kostant when t = 1/3, 8 and the trivial Dirac operator when t = 0. The trivial Dirac operator is used in a model of loop quantum gravity (LQG) to model tetrads. 1 While such a generalized family of operators is mathematically interesting, the authors' original motivation for considering this family was to attempt to calculate the spectral action of the LQG spectral triple of Aastrup, Grimstrup, and Nest. 1, 10 The results obtained in this paper are the asymptotic expansions of the spectral actions for SU(2), SU(3), and U(1) × SU(2). Given an energy scale , the spectral action counts the number of eigenstates with energy below . As grows to a large scale, the coefficients of the -asymptotic of the spectral action capture the residues of the noncommutative Zeta function. 4 The spectral action serves as an action functional in noncommutative geometry. These results may serve as a step toward a LQG spectral action computation (for t = 0), also coupled to matter.The paper is organized in the following manner. Section I defines the one-parameter family of Dirac operators that we are considering. In Sec. II, we express the Dirac Laplacian action on any Clifford module in terms of the action of the Lie algebra's Casimir element on finite-dimensional irreducible representations of the Lie group. This interpretation reduces the problem of finding the spectrum on a general compact Lie group to the specific Clebsch-Gordan decomposition of the tensor products of an irreducible representation with the Weyl representation. We calculate the spectrum of the one-parameter family of Dirac Laplacians on SU(2) and the asymptotic expansion of their spectral actions on in Sec. III. In Sec. IV, we apply the developed machinery to compute the Dirac Laplacian spectrum for SU(3), and in Sec. V, we compute the asymptotic expansion of the spectral action for SU(3) using the two-dimensional Euler-Maclaurin formula, to constant order in . In Sec. VI, we consider a toy infl...