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 [17] and the other is the 0-cycle class defined by Kato for rank 1 sheaves in [16].
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