Deligne-Beilinson cohomology and abelian links invariants

Abstract

For the abelian Chern-Simons field theory, we consider the quantum functional integration over the Deligne-Beilinson cohomology classes and we derive the main properties of the observables in a generic closed orientable 3-manifold. We present an explicit path-integral non-perturbative computation of the Chern-Simons links invariants in the case of the torsion-free 3-manifolds $S^3$, $S^1 \times S^2$ and $S^1 \times \Sigma_g$.