Some Remarks about Duality, Analytic Torsion and Gaussian Integration in Antisymmetric Field Theories

From a path integral point of view (e.g. \cite{Q98}) physicists have shown how {\it duality} in antisymmetric quantum field theories on a closed space-time manifold $M$ relies in a fundamental way on Fourier Transformations of formal infinite-dimensional volume measures. We first review these facts from a measure theoretical point of view, setting the importance of the Hodge decomposition theorem in the underlying geometric picture, ignoring the local symmetry which lead to degeneracies of the action. To handle these degeneracies we then apply Schwarz’s Ansatz showing how duality leads to a factorization of the analytic torsion of $M$ in terms of the partition functions associated to degenerate “dual” actions, which in the even dimensional case corresponds to the identification of these partition functions.