In [HL99], the heat operator of a Bismut superconnection for a family of generalized Dirac operators is defined along the leaves of a foliation with Hausdorff groupoid. The Novikov-Shubin invariants of the Dirac operators were assumed greater than three times the codimension of the foliation. It was then shown that the associated heat operator converges to the Chern character of the index bundle of the operator. In [BH08], this result was improved by reducing the requirement on the Novikov-Shubin invariants to one half of the codimension. In this paper, we construct examples which show that this is the best possible result.

Spectral and dynamical properties of some one-dimensional continuous Schrödinger and Dirac operators with a class of sparse potentials (which take non-zero values only at some sparse and suitably randomly distributed positions) are studied. By adapting and extending to the continuous setting some of the techniques developed for the corresponding discrete operator cases, the Hausdorff dimension of their spectral measures and lower dynamical bounds for transport exponents are determined. Furthermore, it is found that the condition for the spectral Hausdorff dimension to be positive is the same for the existence of a singular continuous spectrum.

We prove a vanishing theorem for the twisted de Rham cohomology of a compact manifold.

We show that the residue density of the logarithm of a generalized Laplacian on a closed manifold defines an invariant polynomial-valued differential form. We express it in terms of a finite sum of residues of classical pseudodifferential symbols. In the case of the square of a Dirac operator, these formulas provide a pedestrian proof of the Atiyah–Singer formula for a pure Dirac operator in four dimensions and for a twisted Dirac operator on a flat space of any dimension. These correspond to special cases of a more general formula by Scott and Zagier. In our approach, which is of perturbative nature, we use either a Campbell–Hausdorff formula derived by Okikiolu or a noncommutative Taylor-type formula.