Bismut superconnections and the Chern character for Dirac operators on foliated manifolds

In this paper, we show how to define a Bismut superconnection for generalized Dirac operators defined along the leaves of a compact foliated manifoldM. Using the heat operator of the curvature of the superconnection, we define a (nonnormalized) Chern character for the Dirac operator, which lies in the Haefliger cohomology of the foliation. Rescaling the metric onM by 1/a and lettinga 0, we obtain the analog of the classical cohomological formula for the index of a family of Dirac operators. In certain special cases, we can also compute the limit asa and show that it is the Chern character of the index bundle given by the kernel of the Dirac operator. Finally, we discuss the relation of our results with the Chern character in cyclic cohomology.