The moduli space
of principally polarized abelian varieties of genus
is defined over
and admits a minimal
compactification
, also
defined over
. The Hodge
bundle over
has its Chern
classes in the Chow ring of
with
-coefficients. We show
that over
, these Chern
classes naturally lift to
and do so in the best possible way: despite the highly singular nature of
they are represented
by algebraic cycles on
which define elements in the bivariant Chow ring. This is in contrast to the situation
in the analytic topology, where these Chern classes have canonical lifts to the
complex cohomology of the minimal compactification as Goresky–Pardon classes,
which are known to define nontrivial Tate extensions inside the mixed Hodge
structure on this cohomology.