Twisting cochains and higher torsion

Abstract

This paper gives a short summary of the central role played by Ed Brown's "twisting cochains" in higher Franz-Reidemeister (FR) torsion and higher analytic torsion. Briefly, any fiber bundle gives a twisting cochain which is unique up to fiberwise homotopy equivalence. However, when they are based, the difference between two of them is a higher algebraic K-theory class measured by higher FR torsion. Flat superconnections are also equivalent to twisting cochains.