INFINITESIMAL GLUING EQUATIONS AND THE ADJOINT HYPERBOLIC REIDEMEISTER TORSION

We establish a link between the derivatives of Thurston's hyperbolic gluing equations on an ideally triangulated finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifold and the cohomology of the sheaf of infinitesimal isometrics. This provides a geometric reformulation of the non-abelian Reidemeister torsion corresponding to the adjoint of the monodromy representation of the hyperbolic structure. These results are then applied to the study of the 'Hoop Conjecture' of Dimofte-Garoufalidis, which we generalize to arbitrary 1-cusped hyperbolic 3-manifolds. We verify the generalized conjecture in the case of the sister manifold of the figure-eight knot complement.