In this article, we show that the Abel–Jacobi images of the Heegner cycles over the Shimura curves constructed by Nekovar, Besser and the theta elements contructed by Chida–Hsieh form a bipartite Euler system in the sense of Howard. As an application of this, we deduce a converse to Gross–Zagier–Kolyvagin type theorem for higher weight modular forms generalising works of Wei Zhang and Skinner for modular forms of weight 2. That is, we show that if the rank of certain residual Selmer group is 1, then the Abel–Jacobi image of the Heegner cycle is nonzero in this residual Selmer group.

We present a level-raising result for families of p-adic automorphic forms for a definite quaternion algebra D over ℚ. The main theorem is an analogue of a theorem for classical automorphic forms due to Diamond and Taylor. We show that certain families of forms old at a prime l intersect with families of l-new forms (at a non-classical point). One of the ingredients in the proof of Diamond and Taylor’s theorem (which also played a role in earlier work of Taylor) is the definition of a suitable pairing on the space of automorphic forms. In our situation one cannot define such a pairing on the infinite dimensional space of p-adic automorphic forms, so instead we introduce a space defined with respect to a dual coefficient system and work with a pairing between the usual forms and the dual space. A key ingredient is an analogue of Ihara’s lemma which shows an interesting asymmetry between the usual and the dual spaces.