The analytic torsion of a disc

Abstract

In this article, we study the Reidemeister torsion and the analytic torsion of the m dimensional disc, with the Ray and Singer homology basis (Adv Math 7:145–210, 1971). We prove that the Reidemeister torsion coincides with a power of the volume of the disc. We study the additional terms arising in the analytic torsion due to the boundary, using generalizations of the Cheeger–Müller theorem. We use a formula proved by Brüning and Ma (GAFA 16:767–873, 2006) that predicts a new anomaly boundary term beside the known term proportional to the Euler characteristic of the boundary (Lück, J Diff Geom 37:263–322, 1993). Some of our results extend to the case of the cone over a sphere, in particular we evaluate directly the analytic torsion for a cone over the circle and over the two sphere. We compare the results obtained in the low dimensional cases. We also consider a different formula for the boundary term given by Dai and Fang (Asian J Math 4:695–714, 2000), and we compare the results. The results of these work were announced in the study of Hartmann et al. (BUMI 2:529–533, 2009).