Subadditivity and additivity of the Yang-Mills action functional in Noncommutative Geometry

Abstract

We formulate notions of subadditivity and additivity of the Yang-Mills action functional in noncommutative geometry. We identify a suitable hypothesis on spectral triples which proves that the Yang-Mills functional is always subadditive, as per expectation. The additivity property is much stronger in the sense that it implies the subadditivity property. Under this hypothesis we obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for the additivity of the Yang-Mills functional. An instance of additivity is shown for the case of noncommutative $n$-tori. We also investigate the behaviour of critical points of the Yang-Mills functional under additivity. At the end we discuss few examples involving compact spin manifolds, matrix algebras, noncommutative $n$-torus and the quantum Heisenberg manifolds which validate our hypothesis.