The Arithmetic Site

Alain Connes, Caterina Consani

Published 2014-05-18Version 1

We show that the non-commutative geometric approach to the Riemann zeta function has an algebraic geometric incarnation: the "Arithmetic Site". This site involves the tropical semiring viewed as a sheaf on the topos which is the dual of the multiplicative semigroup of positive integers. We prove that the set of points of the arithmetic site over the maximal compact subring of the tropical semifield is the non-commutative space quotient of the adele class space of Q by the action of the maximal compact subgroup of the idele class group. We realize the Frobenius correspondences in the square of the "Arithmetic Site" and compute their composition. This note provides the algebraic geometric space underlying the non-commutative approach to RH.