Rationality of Spectral Action for Robertson-Walker Metrics

Abstract

We use pseudodifferential calculus and heat kernel techniques to prove a conjecture by Chamseddine and Connes on rationality of the coefficients of the polynomials in the cosmic scale factor $a(t)$ and its higher derivatives, which describe the general terms $a_{2n}$ in the expansion of the spectral action for general Robertson-Walker metrics. We also compute the terms up to $a_{12}$ in the expansion of the spectral action by our method. As a byproduct, we verify that our computations agree with the terms up to $a_{10}$ that were previously computed by Chamseddine and Connes by a different method.