Axioms for nonunital spectral triples, extending those introduced in the unital case by Connes, are proposed. As a guide, and for the sake of their importance in noncommutative quantum field theory, the spaces R 2N endowed with Moyal products are intensively investigated. Some physical applications, such as the construction of noncommutative Wick monomials and the computation of the Connes-Lott functional action, are given for these noncommutative hyperplanes.

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We classify all irreducible, almost commutative geometries whose spectral action is dynamically non-degenerate. Heavy use is made of Krajewski's diagrammatic language. The motivation for our definition of dynamical non-degeneracy stems from particle physics where the fermion masses are non-degenerate.