Transgression and the Chern character of finite-dimensional K-cycles

It is shown that the [JLO] entire cocycle of a finitely summable unbounded Fredholm module can be retracted to a periodic cocycle. Moreover, the retracted cocycle admits a zero-temperature limit, which provides the extension of the transgressed cocycle of [CM1] from the invertible case to the general case.Dedicated to Huzihiro ArakiResearch supported in part by NSF Grant DMS-9101557