We study the Reidemeister torsion and the analytic torsion of the $m$ dimensional disc in the Euclidean $m$ dimensional space, using the base for the homology defined by Ray and Singer in \cite{ RS}. We prove that the Reidemeister torsion coincides with a power of the volume of the disc. We study the additional terms arising in the analytic torsion due to the boundary, using generalizations of the Cheeger-M\"{ u}ller theorem. We use a formula proved by Br\"uning and Ma \cite{ BM}, that predicts a new anomaly boundary term beside the known term proportional to the Euler characteristic of the boundary \cite{ Luc}. Some of our results extend to the case of the cone over a sphere, in particular we evaluate directly the analytic torsion for a cone over the circle and over the two sphere. We compare the results obtained in the low dimensional cases. We also consider a different formula for the boundary term given by Dai and Fang \cite{ DF}, and we show that the result obtained using this formula is inconsistent with the direct calculation of the analytic torsion.
Categories: math.DG