Scattering matrix and analytic torsion (Q1677884)

Analytic torsion is an invariant of a closed Riemannian manifold computed from the spectrum of its Hodge-Laplace operators. It can be extended to manifolds with boundary by putting boundary conditions, and a useful tool is then the gluing formula. The setting for the latter is the following: \(Z\) is a closed manifold containing a totally geodesic submanifold \(Y\) which separates it into two components \(Z_1, Z_2\), and the goal is to relate the analytic torsions of the three manifolds \(Z, Z_1, Z_2\), usually with a contribution from \(Y\). In this paper the authors give a new proof for such a formula (which was already known by work of \textit{W. Lück} [J. Differ. Geom. 37, No. 2, 263--322 (1993; Zbl 0792.53025)], \textit{S. M. Vishik} [Commun. Math. Phys. 167, No. 1, 1--102 (1995; Zbl 0818.58049)] and \textit{J. Brüning} and \textit{X. Ma} [Math. Z. 273, No. 3--4, 1085--1117 (2013; Zbl 1318.58018)]). The motivation is to adapt their argument to the more involved case of the torsion forms of \textit{J.-M. Bismut} and \textit{S. Goette} [Families torsion and Morse functions. Paris: Société Mathématique de France (2001; Zbl 1071.58025)], which are essentially torsions for smooth families of manifolds; they carry this out in later work [the first author, ``Adiabatic limit, Witten deformation and analytic torsion forms'', Preprint, \url{arxiv:2009.13925}]. The method uses a family of deformations of the manifolds \(Z, Z_i\) obtained by adding product regions \(Y \times [0, R]\) glued to \(\partial Z_i\). They then obtain the gluing formula by studying the asymptotic of the analytic torsions as \(R \to +\infty\) and matching leading coefficients with those for the torsion of a long exact sequence in cohomology (these results are given in Theorems 0.1 and 0.2 in the paper).