Reidemeister torsion was the first topological invariant that could distinguish between spaces which were homotopy equivalent but not homeomorphic. The Cheeger-Müller theorem established that the Reidemeister torsion of a closed manifold can be computed analytically. I will report on joint work with Frédéric Rochon and David Sher on finding a topological expression for the analytic torsion of a manifold with fibered cusp ends. Examples of these manifolds include most locally symmetric spaces of rank one. We establish our theorem by controlling the behavior of analytic torsion as a space degenerates to form hyperbolic cusp ends.[-]

On conformally compact manifolds of arbitrary signature I will describe a natural boundary calculus for computing the asymptotics of a class of natural boundary problems. This is applied to the non-linear problem of finding, conformally, a conformally compact constant scalar curvature metric on the interior of a manifold with boundary. This problem was studied from a different point of view by Andersson, Chrusciel, Friedrich (ACF) in 1992. They identified a conformal submanifold invariant that obstructs smooth boundary asymptotics for the problem on 3-manifolds (and gave some information on the obstructions in other dimensions). This invariant is the same as that arising from the variation of the Willmore energy. We find higher order submanifold invariants that generalise that curvature quantity found by ACF. This construction also leads to a route for manufacturing large classes of other conformal submanifold invariants.[-]