Spanning trees, cycle-rooted spanning forests on discretizations of flat surfaces and analytic torsion

Abstract

We study the asymptotic expansion of the determinant of the graph Laplacian associated to discretizations of a half-translation surface endowed with a flat unitary vector bundle. By doing so, over the discretizations, we relate the asymptotic expansion of the number of spanning trees and the sum of cycle-rooted spanning forests weighted by the monodromy of the connection of the unitary vector bundle, to the corresponding zeta-regularized determinants. As one application, by combining our result with a recent work of Kassel-Kenyon, modulo some universal topological constants, we give an explicit formula for the limit of the probability that a cycle-rooted spanning forest with non-contractible loops, sampled uniformly on discretizations approaching a given surface, induces the given lamination by its cycles. We also calculate an explicit value for the limit of certain topological observables on the associated loop measures.