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On the definition of spacetimes in Noncommutative Geometry, part II

In this second part of the paper, we define spectral spacetimes, a noncommutative generalization of Lorentzian orientable spacetimes of even dimension with a spin structure. There are two main differences with spectral triples: the existence of time-orientation 1-forms and the non-existence of a distinguished C*-structure on the algebra. If a "reconstructibility condition" is met, different, yet isomorphic, C*-structures exist. We define a natural notion of stable causality for spectral spacetimes. We give an example of a commutative spectral spacetime which is a Wick rotated version of the spectral triple that must be used in order to recover the usual notion of distance on a finite graph through Connes' distance formula. We show that this spectral spacetime is stably causal iff the time-orientation form induces no cycle. We also provide a noncommutative example, the split Dirac structure, which we study in some details. This structure is defined thanks to a discrete spinor bundle on a finite graph, a discrete connection, and operators at the vertices playing the role of gamma matrices. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the split Dirac structure to be a spectral spacetime. These includes the natural analogues of the properties defining a spin connection in the continuous case. However the split Dirac structure is not always reconstructible: we prove that this is the case exactly when there exists a parallel timelike vector field on the graph. Nonreconstructible split Dirac structures furnish examples of spectral spacetimes which are not Wick rotations of usual spectral triples, and are thus genuinely Lorentzian. Moreover we show that the Dirac operator of the split Dirac structure is related to a Lorentzian version of a discretization of the Dirac operator introduced earlier by Marcolli and van Suijlekom.