The characteristic class and ramification of an l-adic etale sheaf

We introduce the characteristic class of an l-adic etale sheaf using a cohomological pairing due to Verdier (SGA5). As a consequence of the Lefschetz-Verdier trace formula, its trace computes the Euler-Poincare characteristic of the sheaf. We compare the characteristic class to two other invariants arising from ramification theory. One is the Swan class of Kato-Saito (math.AG/0402010) and the other is the 0-cycle class defined by Kato for rank 1 sheaves.