Adjoint twisted Reidemeister torsion and Gram matrices

Abstract

We compute the adjoint twisted Reidemeister torsion for closed oriented hyperbolic $3$-manifolds and for hyperbolic $3$-manifolds with toroidal boundary. In our formula, we consider the manifold as obtained by doing a Dehn-filling along suitable boundary components of a fundamental shadow link complement, and the formula is in terms of the logarithmic holonomy of the meridians of the boundary components. As an important special case, we also write down a formula of the adjoint twisted Reidemeister torsion for the double of a hyperbolic $3$-manifold with totally geodesic boundary in terms of the edge lengths of a geometric ideal triangulation of the manifold. These unexpected formulas were inspired by, and played an important role in, the study of the asymptotic expansion of quantum invariants\,\cite{WY}.