A BSD formula for high-weight modular forms

Abstract

The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture – which is one of the seven million-dollar Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize Problems – and its generalizations are a significant focus of number theory research.A 2017 article of Jetchev, Skinner and Wan proved a Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer formula at a prime p for certain rational elliptic curves of rank 1. We generalize and adapt that article's arguments to prove an analogous formula for certain modular forms. For newforms f of even weight higher than 2 with Galois representation V containing a Galois-stable lattice T, let W=V/T and let K be an imaginary quadratic field in which the prime p splits. Our main result is that under some conditions, the p-index of the size of the Shafarevich-Tate group of W with respect to the Galois group of K is twice the p-index of a logarithm of the Abel-Jacobi map of a Heegner cycle defined by Bertolini, Darmon and Prasanna.Significant original adaptations we make to the 2017 arguments are (1) a generalized version of a previous calculation of the size of the cokernel of a localization-modulo-torsion map, and (2) a comparison of different Heegner cycles.