In this paper, we prove one divisibility of the Iwasawa–Greenberg main conjecture for the Rankin–Selberg product of a weight two cusp form and an ordinary complex multiplication form of higher weight, using congruences between Klingen Eisenstein series and cusp forms on $\mathrm {GU}(3,1)$, generalizing an earlier result of the third-named author to allow nonordinary cusp forms. The main result is a key input in the third-named author’s proof of Kobayashi’s $\pm $-main conjecture for supersingular elliptic curves. The new ingredient here is developing a semiordinary Hida theory along an appropriate smaller weight space and a study of the semiordinary Eisenstein family.

Let $E/\mathbf {Q}$ be an elliptic curve and $p>3$ be a good ordinary prime for E and assume that $L(E,1)=0$ with root number $+1$ (so $\text {ord}_{s=1}L(E,s)\geqslant 2$ ). A construction of Darmon–Rotger attaches to E and an auxiliary weight 1 cuspidal eigenform g such that $L(E,\text {ad}^{0}(g),1)\neq 0$ , a Selmer class $\kappa _{p}\in \text {Sel}(\mathbf {Q},V_{p}E)$ , and they conjectured the equivalence

$$ \begin{align*} \kappa_{p}\neq 0\quad\Longleftrightarrow\quad{\textrm{dim}}_{{\mathbf{Q}}_{p}}\textrm{Sel}(\mathbf{Q},V_{p}E)=2. \end{align*} $$

In this article, we prove the first cases on Darmon–Rotger’s conjecture when the auxiliary eigenform g has complex multiplication. In particular, this provides a new construction of nontrivial Selmer classes for elliptic curves of rank 2.

In this paper, we prove an ‘explicit reciprocity law’ relating Howard’s system of big Heegner points to a two-variable $p$-adic $L$-function (constructed here) interpolating the $p$-adic Rankin $L$-series of Bertolini–Darmon–Prasanna in Hida families. As applications, we obtain a direct relation between classical Heegner cycles and the higher weight specializations of big Heegner points, refining earlier work of the author, and prove the vanishing of Selmer groups of CM elliptic curves twisted by 2-dimensional Artin representations in cases predicted by the equivariant Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

We extend the $p$-adic Gross–Zagier formula of Bertolini et al. [Generalized Heegner cycles and $p$-adic Rankin $L$-series, Duke Math. J.162(6) (2013), 1033–1148] to the semistable non-crystalline setting, and combine it with our previous work [Castella, On the $p$-adic variation of Heegner points, Preprint, 2014, arXiv:1410.6591] to obtain a derivative formula for the specializations of Howard’s big Heegner points [Howard, Variation of Heegner points in Hida families, Invent. Math.167(1) (2007), 91–128] at exceptional primes in the Hida family.