Co-Euler structures on bordisms

Abstract

Co-Euler structures were studied by Burghelea and Haller on closed manifolds as dual objects to Euler structures. We extend the notion of co-Euler structures to the situation of compact manifolds with boundary. As an application, by studying their variation with respect to smooth changes of the Riemannian metric, co-Euler structures conveniently provide correction terms that can be taken into account when considering the complex-valued analytic torsion on bordisms as a Riemannian invariant.