Renormalization of the spectral action for the Yang-Mills system

Abstract

We establish renormalizability of the full spectral action for the Yang-Mills system on a flat 4-dimensional background manifold. Interpreting the spectral action as a higher-derivative gauge theory, we find that it behaves unexpectedly well as far as renormalization is concerned. Namely, a power counting argument implies that the spectral action is superrenormalizable. From BRST-invariance of the one-loop effective action, we conclude that it is actually renormalizable as a gauge theory.