Index theory on the Miščenko bundle

. We consider the assembly map for principal bundles with fiber a countable discrete group. We obtain an index-theoretic interpretation of this homomorphism by providing a tensor-product presentation for the module of sections associated to the Miščenko line bundle. In addition, we give a proof of Atiyah’s L 2 -index theorem in the general context of flat bundles of finitely generated projective Hilbert C ∗ -modules over compact Hausdorff spaces. We thereby also reestablish that the surjectivity of the Baum-Connes assembly map implies the Kadison-Kaplansky idempotent conjecture in the torsion-free case. Our approach does not rely on geometric K -homology but rather on an explicit construction of Alexander-Spanier cohomology classes coming from a Chern character for tracial function algebras.