My question is related to the question Explanation for the Chern Character to this question about Todd classes, and to this question about the Atiyah-Singer index theorem.
I'm trying to learn the Atiyah-Singer index theorem from standard and less-standard sources, and what I really want now is some soft, heuristic, not-necessarily-rigourous intuitive explanation of why it should be true. I am really just looking for a mental picture, analogous somehow to the mental picture I have of Gauss-Bonnet: "increasing Gaussian curvature tears holes in a surface".
The Atiyah-Singer theorem reads $$\mathrm{Ind}(D)=\int_{T^\ast M}\mathrm{ch}([\sigma_m(D)])\smile \mathrm{Td}(T^\ast M \otimes \mathbb{C})$$
What I want to understand is what the Chern character cup Todd class is actually measuring (heuristically- it doesn't have to be precisely true), and why, integrated over the cotangent bundle, this should give rise to the index of a Fredholm operator. I'm not so much interested in exact formulae at this point as in gleaning some sort of intuition for what is going on "under the hood". The Chern character is beautifully interpreted in this answer by Tyler Lawson, which, however, doesn't tell me what it means to cup it with the Todd class (I can guess that it's some sort of exponent of the logarithm of a formal group law, but this might be rubbish, and it's still not clear what that should be supposed to be measuring). Peter Teichner gives another, to my mind perhaps even more compelling answer, relating the Chern character with looping-delooping (going up and down the n-category ladder? ), but again, I'm missing a picture of what role the Todd class plays in this picture, and why it should have anything to do with the genus of an elliptic operator. I'm also missing a "big picture" explanation of Fei Han's work, even after having read his thesis (can someone familiar with this paper summarize the conceptual idea without the technical details?). Similarly, Jose Figueroa-O'Farrill's answer looks intriguing, but what I'm missing in that picture is intuitive understanding of why at zero temperature, the Witten index should have anything at all to do with Chern characters and Todd classes.
I know (at least in principle) that on both sides of the equation the manifold can be replaced with a point, where the index theorem holds true trivially; but that looks to me like an argument to convince somebody of the fact that it is true, and not an argument which gives any insight as to why it's true.
Let me add background about the Todd class, explained to me by Nigel Higson: "The Todd class is the correction factor that you need to make the Thom homomorphism commute with the Chern character." (I wish I could draw commutative diagrams on MathOverflow!) So for a vector bundle $V\longrightarrow E\longrightarrow X$, you have a Thom homomorphism in the top row $K(X)\rightarrow K_c(E)$, one in the bottom row $H^\ast_c(X;\mathbb{Q})\rightarrow H_c^\ast(E;\mathbb{Q})$, and Chern characters going from the top row to the bottom row. This diagram doesn't commute in general, but it commutes modulo the action of $\mathrm{TD}(E)$. I don't think I understand why any of this is relevant.
In summary, my question is
Do you have a soft not-necessarily-rigourous intuitive explanation of what each term in the Atiyah-Singer index theorem is trying to measure, and of why, in these terms, the Atiyah-Singer index theorem might be expected to hold true.
Best Answer
I don't think I can really give you the intuition that you seek because I don't think I quite have it yet either. But I think that understanding the relevance of Nigel Higson's comment might help, and I can try to provide some insight. (Full disclosure: most of my understanding of these matters has been heavily influenced by Nigel Higson and John Roe).
My first comment is that the index theorem should be regarded as a statement about K-theory, not as a cohomological formula. Understanding the theorem in this way suppresses many complications (such as the confusing appearance of the Todd class!) and lends itself most readily to generalization. Moreover the K-theory proof of the index theorem parallels the "extrinsic" proof of the Gauss Bonnet theorem, making the result seem a little more natural. The appearance of the Chern character and Todd class are explained in this context by the observations that the Chern character maps K-theory (vector bundles) to cohomology (differential forms) and that the Todd class measures the difference between the Thom isomorphism in K-theory and the Thom isomorphism in cohomology. I unfortunately can't give you any better intuition for the latter statement than what can be obtained by looking at Atiyah and Singer's proof, but in any event my point is that the Todd class arises because we are trying to convert what ought to be a K-theory statement into a cohomological statement, not for a reason that is truly intrinsic to the index theorem.
Before I elaborate on the K-theory proof, I want to comment that there is also a local proof of the index theorem which relies on detailed asymptotic analysis of the heat equation associated to a Dirac operator. This is analogous to certain intrinsic proofs of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, but according to my understanding the argument doesn't provide the same kind of intuition that the K-theory argument does. The basic strategy of the local argument, as simplified by Getzler, is to invent a symbolic calculus for the Dirac operator which reduces the theorem to a computation with a specific example. This example is a version of the quantum-mechanical harmonic oscillator operator, and a coordinate calculation directly produces the $\hat{A}$ genus (the appropriate "right-hand side" of the index theorem for the Dirac operator). There are some slightly more conceptual versions of this proof, but none that I have seen REALLY explain the geometric meaning of the $\hat{A}$ genus.
So let's look at the K-theory argument. The first step is to observe that the symbol of an elliptic operator gives rise to a class in $K(T^*M)$. If the operator acts on smooth sections of a vector bundle $S$, then its symbol is a map $T^*M \to End(S)$ which is invertible away from the origin; Atiyah's "clutching" construction produces the relevant K-theory class. Second, one constructs an "analytic index" map $K(T^*M) \to \mathbb{Z}$ which sends the symbol class to the index of $D$. The crucial point about the construction of this map is that it is really just a jazzed up version of the basic case where $M = \mathbb{R}^2$, and in that case the analytic index map is the Bott periodicity isomorphism. Third, one constructs a "topological index map" $K(T^*M) \to \mathbb{Z}$ as follows. Choose an embedding $M \to \mathbb{R}^n$ (one must prove later that the choice of embedding doesn't matter) and let $E$ be the normal bundle of the manifold $T^*M$. $E$ is diffeomorphic to a tubular neighborhood $U$ of $T^*M$, so we have a composition
$K(T^* M) \to K(E) \to K(U) \to K(T^*\mathbb{R}^n)$
Here the first map is the Thom isomorphism, the second is induced by the tubular neighborhood diffeomorphism, and the third is induced by inclusion of an open set (i.e. extension of a vector bundle on an open set to a vector bundle on the whole manifold). But K-theory is a homotopy functor, so $K(T^* \mathbb{R}^n) \cong K(\text{point}) = \mathbb{Z}$, and we have obtained our topological index map from $K(T^*M)$ to $\mathbb{Z}$. The last step of the proof is to show that the analytic index map and the topological index map are equal, and here again the basic idea is to invoke Bott periodicity. Note that we expect Bott periodicity to be the relevant tool because it is crucial to the construction of both the analytic and topological index maps - in the topological index map it is hiding in the construction of the Thom isomorphism, which by definition is the product with the Bott element in K-theory.
To recover the cohomological formulation of the index theorem, just apply Chern characters to the composition of K-theory maps which defines the topological index. The K-theory formulation of the index theorem says that if you "plug in" the symbol class then you get out the index, and all squares with K-theory on top and cohomology on the bottom commute except for the "Thom isomorphism square", which introduces the Todd class. So the main challenge is to get an intuitive grasp of the K-theory formulation of the index theorem, and as I hope you can see the main idea is the Bott periodicity theorem.
I hope this helps!