Non-vanishing of Kolyvagin systems and Iwasawa theory

Let $E\mathrm{/}\mathbb{Q}$ be an elliptic curve and $p$ an odd prime. In 1991 Kolyvagin conjectured that the system of cohomology classes for torsion quotients of the $p$-adic Tate module of $E$ derived from Heegner points over ring class fields of a suitable imaginary quadratic field $K$ (i.e., the Heegner point Kolyvagin system of $E\mathrm{/}K$) is non-trivial. In this paper we prove Kolyvagin’s conjecture when $p$ is a prime of good ordinary reduction for $E$ that splits in $K$. In particular, our results cover many cases where $p$ is an Eisenstein prime for $E$, complementing Wei Zhang’s earlier results on the conjecture by a different approach. Our methods also yield a proof of a refinement of Kolyvagin’s conjecture expressing the divisibility index of the Heegner point Kolyvagin system in terms of the Tamagawa numbers of $E$, as conjectured by Wei Zhang in 2014, as well as proofs of analogous results for the Kolyvagin system obtained from Kato’s Euler system.