We compute the curvature of the determinant line bundle on a family of Dirac operators for a noncommutative two torus. Following Quillen's original construction for Riemann surfaces and using zeta regularized determinant of Laplacians, one can endow the determinant line bundle with a natural Hermitian metric. By using an analogue of Kontsevich-Vishik canonical trace, defined on Connes' algebra of classical pseudodifferential symbols for the noncommutative two torus, we compute the curvature form of the determinant line bundle by computing the second variation δwδw log det(∆).

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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.

Motivated by the local formulae for asymptotic expansion of heat kernels in spectral geometry, we propose a definition of Ricci curvature in noncommutative settings. The Ricci operator of an oriented closed Riemannian manifold can be realized as a spectral functional, namely the functional defined by the zeta function of the full Laplacian of the de Rham complex, localized by smooth endomorphisms of the cotangent bundle and their trace. We use this formulation to introduce the Ricci functional in a noncommutative setting and in particular for curved noncommutative tori. This Ricci functional uniquely determines a density element, called the Ricci density, which plays the role of the Ricci operator. The main result of this paper provides an explicit computation of the Ricci density when the conformally flat geometry of the noncommutative two torus is encoded by the modular de Rham spectral triple. * R. Floricel and M. Khalkhali are supported by NSERC Discovery grants. A. Ghorbanpour is partially supported by a PIMS postdoctoral fellowship.

We compute the Ricci curvature of a curved noncommutative three torus. The computation is done both for conformal and non-conformal perturbations of the flat metric. To perturb the flat metric, the standard volume form on the noncommutative three torus is perturbed and the corresponding perturbed Laplacian is analyzed. Using Connes' pseudodifferential calculus for the noncommutative tori, we explicitly compute the second term of the short time heat kernel expansion for the perturbed Laplacians on functions and on 1-forms. The Ricci curvature is defined by localizing heat traces suitably. Equivalerntly, it can be defined through special values of localized spectral zeta functions. We also compute the scalar curvatures and compare our results with previous calculations in the conformal case. Finally we compute the classical limit of our formulas and show that they coincide with classical formulas in the commutative case.