Noncommutative 3-sphere as an example of noncommutative contact algebras

The notion of deformation quantization was introduced by F.Bayen, M.Flato et al. in [1]. The basic idea is to formally deform the pointwise commutative multiplication in the space of smooth functions $C^∞(M)$ on a symplectic manifold $M$ to a noncommutative associative multiplication, whose first order commutator is proportional to the Poisson bracket. It is of interest to compute this quantization for naturally occuring cases. In this paper, we discuss deformations of contact algebras and give a definition of deformations of algebras slightly different from the deformation quantization of Poisson algebras. Since the standard 3-sphere is a basic example of a contact manifold, we study the properties of the noncommutative 3-sphere obtained by this reduction. We remark that the parameter of the deformation of a contact algebra is not in the center, while the deformation quantization of Poisson algebras is given by algebras of formal power series of functions on a manifold; in particular, the deformation parameter is a central element. Details and related results will appear in [6] and [7].