On the vanishing of Selmer groups for elliptic curves over ring class fields

Abstract

Let E be a rational elliptic curve of conductor N without complex multiplication and let K be an imaginary quadratic field of discriminant D prime to N. Assume that the number of primes dividing N and inert in K is odd, and let H be the ring class field of K of conductor c prime to ND with Galois group G over K. Fix a complex character χof G. Our main result is that if the special value of the χ-twisted L-function of E/K is non-zero then the tensor product (with respect to χ) of the p-Selmer group of E/H with W over Z[G] is 0 for all but finitely many primes p, where W is a suitable finite extension of Z_p containing the values of χ. Our work extends results of Bertolini and Darmon to almost all non-ordinary primes p and also offers alternative proofs of a χ-twisted version of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for E over H (Bertolini and Darmon) and of the vanishing of the p-Selmer group of E/K for almost all p (Kolyvagin) in the case of analytic rank zero.

31 pages, minor modifications; final version, to appear in Journal of Number Theory