This paper extends the notion of a spectral triple to a relative spectral triple, an unbounded analogue of a relative Fredholm module for an ideal J ⊳ A. Examples include manifolds with boundary, manifolds with conical singularities, dimension drop algebras, θ-deformations and Cuntz-Pimsner algebras of vector bundles. The bounded transform of a relative spectral triple is a relative Fredholm module, making the image of a relative spectral triple under the boundary mapping in K-homology easy to compute. We introduce an additional operator called a Clifford normal with which a relative spectral triple can be doubled into a spectral triple. The Clifford normal also provides a boundary Hilbert space, a representation of the quotient algebra, a boundary Dirac operator and an analogue of the Calderon projection. In the examples this data does assemble to give a boundary spectral triple, though we can not prove this in general. When we do obtain a boundary spectral triple, we provide sufficient conditions for the boundary triple to represent the K-homological boundary. Thus we abstract the proof of Baum-Douglas-Taylor's "boundary of Dirac is Dirac on the boundary" theorem into the realm of non-commutative geometry.computation of the image ∂x of x under the K-homology boundary map ∂: a difficult problem in general, [6]. Finally, internal to non-commutative geometry there is the more philosophical question of what should be the non-commutative analogue of a manifold with boundary.Historically, attempts to incorporate manifolds with boundary into non-commutative geometry have either imposed self-adjoint boundary conditions on a Dirac operator (like APS), which generically collapse the boundary to a point, for example [5,31], or they have made the Dirac operator selfadjoint by pushing the boundary to infinity. In fact APS boundary conditions are closely related to the latter framework. More general constructions are possible, for instance [33].The main idea in this paper is to loosen the self-adjointness condition appearing in a spectral triple, requiring only a symmetric operator with additional analytic properties relative to an ideal. Sections 2 and 3 and the appendices are based on results from the Ph.D thesis of the first named author, [20].
The main resultsOur approach is inspired by the work of Baum-Douglas-Taylor [6], and the main players in this paper are relative spectral triples and Kasparov modules, introduced in Section 2. We work with a Z/2graded C * -algebra A and a closed graded * -ideal J ⊳ A. Loosely speaking, a relative spectral triple for J A is a triple (J A, H, D) satisfying the usual axioms of a spectral triple for the dense * -subalgebra A ⊆ A save the fact that the odd operator D is symmetric and j Dom(For the precise definition, see Definition 2.1 on page 5, and we follow the definition with numerous examples. The first important result is that relative spectral triples give relative Fredholm modules, and so relative K-homology classes. Theorem (Bounded transforms of relative spectral triples). Let...