The Podles sphere as a spectral metric space

Abstract

We study the spectral metric aspects of the standard Podles sphere, which is a homogeneous space for quantum SU(2). The point of departure is the real equivariant spectral triple investigated by Dabrowski and Sitarz. The Dirac operator of this spectral triple interprets the standard Podles sphere as a 0-dimensional space and is therefore not isospectral to the Dirac operator on the 2-sphere. We show that the seminorm coming from commutators with this Dirac operator provides the Podles sphere with the structure of a compact quantum metric space in the sense of Rieffel.