The Fried conjecture in small dimensions (Q1985460)

\textit{D. Fried} [Contemp. Math. 58, No. 3, 19--69 (1987; Zbl 0619.58034)] exhibited contexts in which there is a quantitative relationship between closed orbits of flows and the topology of a manifold supporting the flow. This contrasts with the Wilson plug construction which in particular allows any nonsingular flow to be deformed through nonsingular flows to remove all the closed orbits. D. Fried conjectured (and proved in certain cases) that the analytic torsion (itself conjecturally equal to the Reidemeister torsion) of a smooth manifold is related to the value at \(0\) of a dynamical zeta function associated to a smooth vector field. In this paper the conjecture is proved for smooth Anosov vector fields on \(3\)-manifolds, and in higher dimensions the value of the associated zeta function at \(0\) is shown to be locally constant with respect to the vector field under a spectral hypothesis. One of the consequences is a proof of Fried's conjecture for Anosov flows near the geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle of hyperbolic \(3\)-manifolds, giving the first instances of non-analytic Anosov flows and geodesic flows in variable negative curvature for which the Fried conjecture is known to hold.