The purpose of this paper is to give a refinement of the Atiyah-Singer families index theorem at the level of differential characters. Also a Riemann-Roch-Grothendieck theorem for the direct image of flat vector bundles by proper submersions is proved,with Chern classes with coefficients in C/Q. These results are much related to prior work of Gillet-Soule, Bismut-Lott and Lott.