Given an acyclic representation  of the fundamental group of a compact oriented odd-dimensional manifold, which is close enough to an acyclic unitary representation, we define a refinement T of the Ray-Singer torsion associated to , which can be viewed as the analytic counterpart of the refined combinatorial torsion introduced by Turaev. T is equal to the graded determinant of the odd signature operator up to a correction term, the metric anomaly, needed to make it independent of the choice of the Riemannian metric.T is a holomorphic function on the space of such representations of the fundamental group. When  is a unitary representation, the absolute value of T is equal to the Ray-Singer torsion and the phase of T is proportional to the -invariant of the odd signature operator. The fact that the Ray-Singer torsion and the-invariant can be combined into one holomorphic function allows one to use methods of complex analysis to study both invariants. In particular, using these methods we compute the quotient of the refined analytic torsion and Turaev’s refinement of the combinatorial torsion generalizing in this way the classical Cheeger-M¨uller theorem. As an application, we extend and improve a result of Farber about the relationship between the Farber-Turaev absolute torsion and the -invariant. As part of our construction of T we prove several new results about determinants and -invariants of non self-adjoint elliptic operators.

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In this paper we present a new algorithm which turns an unstructured triangle mesh into a quad dominant mesh with edges well aligned to the principal directions of the underlying surface. Instead of computing a globally smooth parameterization or integrating curvature lines along a tangent vector field, we simply apply an iterative relaxation scheme which incrementally aligns the mesh edges to the principal directions. We further obtain the quad dominant mesh by dropping the not-aligned diagonal edges from the triangle mesh. A post-processing stage is introduced to further improve the results. The major advantage of our algorithm is its conceptual simplicity since it is merely based on elementary mesh operations such as edge collapse, flip, and split. Various results are presented in the paper; they show a good alignment to surface features and rather uniform distribution of mesh vertices. This makes them well suited, e.g., as CatmullClark Subdivision control meshes.

We derive the joint asymptotic distribution of the outlier eigenvalues of an additively deformed Wigner matrix $H$. Our only assumptions on the deformation are that its rank be fixed and its norm bounded. Our results extend those of [The isotropic semicircle law and deformation of Wigner matrices. Preprint] by admitting overlapping outliers and by computing the joint distribution of all outliers. In particular, we give a complete description of the failure of universality first observed in [Ann. Probab. 37 (2009) 1-47; Ann. Inst. Henri Poincar\'{e} Probab. Stat. 48 (1013) 107-133; Free convolution with a semi-circular distribution and eigenvalues of spiked deformations of Wigner matrices. Preprint]. We also show that, under suitable conditions, outliers may be strongly correlated even if they are far from each other. Our proof relies on the isotropic local semicircle law established in [The isotropic semicircle law and deformation of Wigner matrices. Preprint]. The main technical achievement of the current paper is the joint asymptotics of an arbitrary finite family of random variables of the form $\langle\mathbf{v},(H-z)^{-1}\mathbf{w}\rangle$.

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