The Chern character for Lie-Rinehart algebras

Abstract

Classical Chern-Weil theory proves existence of a ring homomorphism - the Chern character - from the Grothendieck ring of locally free finite rank A-modules to the algebraic de Rham cohomology of A. In this paper we prove existence of a ring homomorphism from the Grothendieck ring of locally free finite rank A-modules with an L-connection to the Lie-Rinehart cohomology of L, where L is a Lie-Rinehart algebra. As a corollary we get the classical Chern character.