Renormalised Chern Weil forms associated with families of Dirac operators

We provide local expressions for Chern-Weil type forms built from superconnections associated with families of Dirac operators previously investigated in [S. Scott, Zeta-Chern forms and the local family index theorem, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. (in press). arXiv: math.DG/0406294] and later in [S. Paycha, S. Scott, Chern-Weil forms associated with superconnections, in: B. Booss-Bavnbeck, S. Klimek, M. Lesch, W. Zhang (Eds.), Analysis, Geometry and Topology of Elliptic Operators, World Scientific, 2006]. When the underlying fibration of manifolds is trivial, the even degree forms can be interpreted as renormalised Chern-Weil forms in as far as they coincide with regularised Chern-Weil forms up to residue correction terms. Similarly, a new formula for the curvature of the local fermionic vacuum line bundles is derived using a residue correction term added to the naive curvature formula. We interpret the odd degree Chern-Weil type forms built from superconnections as Wodzicki residues and establish a transgression formula along the lines of known transgression formulae for η-forms.