Kolyvagin systems and Iwasawa theory of generalized Heegner cycles

Iwasawa theory of Heegner points on abelian varieties of GL_2 type has been studied by, among others, Mazur, Perrin-Riou, Bertolini and Howard. The purpose of this paper is to describe extensions of some of their results in which abelian varieties are replaced by the Galois cohomology of Deligne's p-adic representation attached to a modular form of even weight >2. In this setting, the role of Heegner points is played by higher-dimensional Heegner-type cycles that have been recently defined by Bertolini, Darmon and Prasanna. Our results should be compared with those obtained, via deformation-theoretic techniques, by Fouquet in the context of Hida families of modular forms.