On Euler systems of rank r and their Kolyvagin systems

Abstract

In this paper we set up a general Kolyvagin system machinery for Euler systems of rank r (in the sense of Perrin- Riou) associated to a large class of Galois representations, building on our previous work on Kolyvagin systems of Rubin-Stark units and generalizing the results of Kato, Rubin and Perrin-Riou. Our machinery produces a bound on the size of the classical Selmer group attached to a Galois representation T (that satisfies certain technical hypotheses) in terms of a certain r r determinant; a bound which remarkably goes hand in hand with Bloch-Kato conjectures. At the end, we present an application based on a conjecture of Perrin-Riou on p-adic L-functions, which lends further evidence to Bloch-Kato conjectures.