The spectral distance on the Moyal plane

We study the noncommutative geometry of the Moyal plane from a metric point of view. Starting from a non compact spectral triple based on the Moyal deformation A of the algebra of Schwartz functions on R^2, we explicitly compute Connes' spectral distance between the pure states of A corresponding to eigenfunctions of the quantum harmonic oscillator. For other pure states, we provide a lower bound to the spectral distance, and show that the latest is not always finite. As a consequence, we show that the spectral triple [20] is not a spectral metric space in the sense of [5]. This motivates the study of truncations of the spectral triple, based on M_n(C) with arbitrary integer n, which turn out to be compact quantum metric spaces in the sense of Rieffel. Finally the distance is explicitly computed for n=2.Comment: Published version. Misprints corrected and references updated; Journal of Geometry and Physics (2011

A Lorentzian Signature Model for Quantum General Relativity

We give a relativistic spin network model for quantum gravity based on the Lorentz group and its q-deformation, the Quantum Lorentz Algebra. We propose a combinatorial model for the path integral given by an integral over suitable representations of this algebra. This generalises the state sum models for the case of the four-dimensional rotation group previously studied in gr-qc/9709028. As a technical tool, formulae for the evaluation of relativistic spin networks for the Lorentz group are developed, with some simple examples which show that the evaluation is finite in interesting cases. We conjecture that the `10J' symbol needed in our model has a finite value.Comment: 22 pages, latex, amsfonts, Xypic. Version 3: improved presentation. Version 2 is a major revision with explicit formulae included for the evaluation of relativistic spin networks and the computation of examples which have finite value