pages 29, final version, to appear in "The Legacy of Bernhard Riemann After One Hundred and Fifty Years" , Advanced Lectures in Mathematics 35, Higher Education Press, Bejing
The article consists of a survey on analytic and topological torsion. Analytic torsion is defined in terms of the spectrum of the analytic Laplace operator on a Riemannian manifold, whereas topological torsion is defined in terms of a triangulation. The celebrated theorem of Cheeger and Müller identifies these two notions for closed Riemannian manifolds. We also deal with manifolds with boundary and with isometric actions of finite groups. The basic theme is to extract topological invariants from the spectrum of the analytic Laplace operator on a Riemannian manifold.
The work of Ray and Singer which introduced analytic torsion, a kind of determinant of the Laplacian operator in topological and holomorphic settings, is naturally generalized in both settings. The couplings are extended in a direct way in the topological setting to general flat bundles and in the holomorphic setting to bundles with (1,1) connections, which using the Newlander-Nirenberg Theorem are seen to be the bundles with both holomorphic and anti-holomorphic structures. The resulting natural generalizations of Laplacians are not always self-adjoint and the corresponding generalizations of…
Braverman and Kappeler introduced a refinement of the Ray-Singer analytic torsion associated to a flat vector bundle over a closed odd-dimensional manifold. We study this notion and improve the Braverman-Kappeler theorem comparing the refined analytic torsion with Farber-Turaev refinement of the combinatorial torsion. Using this result we establish, modulo sign, the Burghelea-Haller conjecture, comparing their complex analytic torsion with Farber-Turaev torsion in the case, when the flat connection can be deformed in the space of flat connections to a Hermitian connection. We also compute the …
This article studies the abelian analytic torsion on a closed, oriented, Sasakian three-manifold and identifies this quantity as a specific multiple of the natural unit symplectic volume form on the moduli space of flat abelian connections. This identification computes the analytic torsion explicitly in terms of Seifert data.
In this paper we establish a comparison formula of the absolute and relative real analytic torsion forms over fibrations with boundaries. The key tool is a gluing formula of analytic torsion forms proved by M. Puchol, Y. Zhang and the author. As a consequence of the comparison formula, we prove another version of the gluing formula of the analytic torsion forms conjectured originally by the author.
On an odd-dimensional oriented hyperbolic manifold of finite volume with strongly acyclic coefficient systems, we derive a formula relating analytic torsion with the Reidemeister torsion of the Borel-Serre compactification of the manifold. In a companion paper, this formula is used to derive exponential growth of torsion in cohomology of arithmetic groups.
For a non-compact hyperbolic 3-manifold with cusps we prove an explicit formula that relates the regularized analytic torsion associated to the even symmetric powers of the standard representation of SL_2(C) to the corresponding Reidemeister torsion. Our proof rests on an expression of the analytic torsion in terms of special values of Ruelle zeta functions as well as on recent work of Pere Menal-Ferrer and Joan Porti.
We introduce multi-torsion, a spectral invariant generalizing Ray-Singer analytic torsion. We define multi-torsion for compact manifolds with a certain local geometric product structure that gives a bigrading on differential forms. We prove that multi-torsion is metric-independent in a suitable sense. Our definition of multi-torsion is inspired by an interpretation of each of analytic torsion and the eta invariant as a regularized integral of a closed differential form on a space of metrics on a vector bundle or on a space of elliptic operators. We generalize the Stokes' theorem argument expla…
We prove that for certain sequences of hyperbolic three--manifolds with cusps which converge to hyperbolic three--space in a weak ("Benjamini-Schramm") sense and certain coefficient systems the regularized analytic torsion approximates the $L^2$-torsion of the universal cover under an additional hypothesis. We also prove an asymptotic equality between the former and some Reidemeister torsion of the truncated manifolds.
In this paper we extend first the Bismut-Lott's analytic torsion form for flat vector bundles to the boundary case, then we establish its gluing formula on a smooth fibration under the assumption that a fiberwise Morse function exists. We assume that the metrics have product structures near the cutting hypersurface.
In this article we use the adiabatic method to prove the gluing formula of real analytic torsion forms for a flat vector bundle on a smooth fibration under the assumption that the fiberwise twisted cohomology groups associated to the fibration of the cutting hypersurface are vanished. In this paper we assume that the metrics have product structures near the cutting hypersurface.
The construction of invariants of three-dimensional manifolds with a triangulated boundary, proposed earlier by the author for the case when the boundary consists of not more than one connected component, is generalized to any number of components. These invariants are based on the torsion of acyclic complexes of geometric origin. The relevant tool for studying our invariants turns out to be F.A. Berezin's calculus of anti-commuting variables; in particular, they are used in the formulation of the main theorem of the paper, concerning the composition of invariants under a gluing of manifolds. …
We establish a Cheeger-Muller theorem for unimodular representations satisfying a Witt condition on a noncompact manifold with cusps. This class of spaces includes all non-compact hyperbolic spaces of finite volume, but we do not assume that the metric has constant curvature nor that the link of the cusp is a torus. We use renormalized traces in the sense of Melrose to define the analytic torsion and we relate it to the intersection R-torsion of Dar of the natural compactification to a stratified space. Our proof relies on our recent work on the behavior of the Hodge Laplacian spectrum on a cl…
We show that the refined analytic torsion is a holomorphic section of the determinant line bundle over the space of complex representations of the fundamental group of a closed oriented odd dimensional manifold. Further, we calculate the ratio of the refined analytic torsion and the Farber-Turaev combinatorial torsion. As an application, we establish a formula relating the eta-invariant and the phase of the Farber-Turaev torsion, which extends a theorem of Farber and earlier results of ours. This formula allows to study the spectral flow using methods of combinatorial topology.
We construct a canonical element, called the refined analytic torsion, of the determinant line of the cohomology of a closed oriented odd-dimensional manifold M with coefficients in a flat complex vector bundle E. We compute the Ray-Singer norm of the refined analytic torsion. In particular, if there exists a flat Hermitian metric on E, we show that this norm is equal to 1. We prove a duality theorem, establishing a relationship between the refined analytic torsions corresponding to a flat connection and its dual.
This is a short version of math.DG/0505537. For an acyclic representation of the fundamental group of a compact oriented odd-dimensional manifold, which is close enough to a unitary representation, we define a refinement of the Ray-Singer torsion associated to this representation. This new invariant can be viewed as an analytic counterpart of the refined combinatorial torsion introduced by Turaev. The refined analytic torsion is a holomorphic function of the representation of the fundamental group. When the representation is unitary, the absolute value of the refined analytic torsion is equal …
We consider topological field theories that compute the Reidemeister-Milnor-Turaev torsion in three dimensions. These are the psl(1|1) and the U(1|1) Chern-Simons theories, coupled to a background complex flat gauge field. We use the 3d mirror symmetry to derive the Meng-Taubes theorem, which relates the torsion and the Seiberg-Witten invariants, for a three-manifold with arbitrary first Betti number. We also present the Hamiltonian quantization of our theories, find the modular transformations of states, and various properties of loop operators. Our results for the U(1|1) theory are in genera…
We discuss an infinite class of metabelian Von Neumann rho-invariants. Each one is a homomorphism from the monoid of knots to the real line. In general they are not well defined on the concordance group. Nonetheless, we show that they pass to well defined homomorphisms from the subgroup of the concordance group generated by anisotropic knots. Thus, the computation of even one of these invariants can be used to conclude that a knot is of infinite order. We introduce a method to give a computable bound on these invariants. Finally we compute this bound to get a new and explicit infinite set of t…
Starting from the results in math.DG:1212.3161 we prove that for a given Bianchi group, certain natural coefficent modules and a lot of sequences of congruence subgroups of the size of the torsion subgroup of the first homology grows exponentially with the index (we give an explicit rate). We also prove limit multiplicity results for the irreducible components of the space of cuspidal forms.
We introduce and study a canonical quadratic form, called the torsion quadratic form, of the determinant line of a flat vector bundle over a closed oriented odd-dimensional manifold. This quadratic form caries less information than the refined analytic torsion, introduced in our previous work, but is easier to construct and closer related to the combinatorial Farber-Turaev torsion. In fact, the torsion quadratic form can be viewed as an analytic analogue of the Poincare-Reidemeister scalar product, introduced by Farber and Turaev. Moreover, it is also closely related to the complex analytic to…
The analytic torsion is computed on fixed-point free and non fixed-point free factors (tessellations) of the three--sphere. We repeat the standard computation on spherical space forms (Clifford-Klein spaces) by an improved technique. The transformation to a simpler form of the spectral expression of the torsion on spherical factors effected by Ray is shown to be more general than his derivation implies. It effectively allows the eigenvalues to be considered as squares of integers, and applies also to trivial twistings. The analytic torsions compute to algebraic numbers, as expected. In the cas…
