Equivariant torsion and G-CW-complexes (Q1288146)

Let \(G\) be a compact Lie group, \(M\) be a closed oriented \(G\)-manifold with invariant Riemannian metric and \(E\) be a flat bundle of finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. Lott and Rothenberg have defined analytic torsion \(\rho_{\text{an}}(M,E)\). Let \(FG\) be the subset of \(G\) consisting of elements of finite order. In this paper equivariant Reidemeister torsion \(\rho(M,E)\) is defined which takes values in the set \(C(FG)\) of functions from \(FG\) which are invariant under conjugation. Essentially \(\rho(M;E)\) is given by the collections of the equivariant Reidemeister torsions \(\rho(\text{res}^H_G M,E)\) of the restriction of \(M\) to an \(H\)-manifold for all possible finite subgroups \(H\subset G\). One result of this paper is a generalization of the Cheeger-Müller theorem to this equivariant setting, namely that the analytic version \(\rho_{\text{an}}(M,E)\) restricted to \(C(FG)\) coincides with the topological version \(\rho(M,E)\). This follows from the corresponding result for finite groups \(H\) which has been proven by Lott and Rothenberg. Let \(\widehat C (FG)\) be the quotient of \(C(FG)\) by the subspace generated by characters of \(G/G^0\) and \(\widehat\rho(M,E)\) be the image of \(\rho(M;E)\) under the canonical projection. Since \(G^0\) acts trivially on the homology, \(\widehat\rho (M,E)\) does not depend on the choice of the metrics. The element \(\widehat\rho (M,E)\) satisfies a sum formula where no contributions by the Mayer-Vietoris-sequences occur. Therefore \(\widehat\rho(M,E)\) can be computed as a sum over the cells \(c=G/H_c\times D^{n(c)}\), where the contribution of a cell \(c\) is \((-1)^{n (C)}\cdot\widehat\rho (G/H_c,E |_c)\). The torsion of the homogeneous spaces \(G/H_c\) in \(\widehat C(FG)\) can be computed explicitely in terms of characters.