Anomaly formulas for the complex-valued analytic torsion on compact bordisms

TL;DR

This paper extends the complex-valued analytic torsion to compact Riemannian bordisms, deriving anomaly formulas by analyzing spectral properties of non-selfadjoint Laplacians with boundary conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a new extension of analytic torsion to bordisms and derives anomaly formulas considering boundary effects and spectral properties.

Findings

Derived anomaly formulas for complex-valued analytic torsion on bordisms.

Established spectral properties of non-selfadjoint Laplacians with boundary conditions.

Confirmed consistency with previous results in odd dimensions.

Abstract

We extend the complex-valued analytic torsion, introduced by Burghelea and Haller on closed manifolds, to compact Riemannian bordisms. We do so by considering a flat complex vector bundle over a compact Riemannian manifold, endowed with a fiberwise nondegenerate symmetric bilinear form. The Riemmanian metric and the bilinear form are used to define non-selfadjoint Laplacians acting on vector-valued smooth forms under absolute and relative boundary conditions. In the process to define the complex-valued analytic torsion, we study spectral properties associated to these generalized Laplacians. As main results, we obtain anomaly formulas for the complex-valued analytic torsion. Our reasoning takes into account that the coefficients in the heat trace asymptotic expansion associated to the boundary value problem under consideration, are locally computable. The anomaly formulas for the complex-valued Ray--Singer torsion are obtained by using the corresponding ones for the Ray--Singer metric, obtained by Bruening and Ma on manifolds with boundary, and an argument of analytic continuation. In odd dimensions, our anomaly formulas are in accord with the corresponding results of Su, without requiring the variations of the Riemannian metric and bilinear structures to be supported in the interior of the manifold.