Heegner points play an outstanding role in the study of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, providing canonical Mordell–Weil generators whose heights encode first derivatives of the associated Hasse–Weil L-series. Yet the fruitful connection between Heegner points and L-series also accounts for their main limitation, namely that they are torsion in (analytic) rank >1. This partly expository article discusses the generalised Kato classes introduced in Bertolini et al. (J Algebr Geom 24:569–604, 2015) and Darmon and Rotger (J AMS 2016), stressing their analogy with Heegner points but explaining why they are expected to give non-trivial, canonical elements of the idoneous Selmer group in settings where the classical L-function (of Hasse–Weil–Artin type) that governs their behaviour has a double zero at the centre. The generalised Kato class denoted ¿(f,g,h) is associated to a triple (f, g, h) consisting of an eigenform f of weight two and classical p-stabilised eigenforms g and h of weight one, corresponding to odd two-dimensional Artin representations Vg and Vh of Gal(H/Q) with p-adic coefficients for a suitable number field H. This class is germane to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture over H for the modular abelian variety E over Q attached to f. One of the main results of Bertolini et al. (2015) and Darmon and Rotger (J AMS 2016) is that ¿(f,g,h) lies in the pro-p Selmer group of E over H precisely when L(E,Vgh,1)=0, where L(E,Vgh,s) is the L-function of E twisted by Vgh:=Vg¿Vh. In the setting of interest, parity considerations imply that L(E,Vgh,s) vanishes to even order at s=1, and the Selmer class ¿(f,g,h) is expected to be trivial when ords=1L(E,Vgh,s)>2. The main new contribution of this article is a conjecture expressing ¿(f,g,h) as a canonical point in (E(H)¿Vgh)GQ when ords=1L(E,Vgh,s)=2. This conjecture strengthens and refines the main conjecture of Darmon et al. (Forum Math Pi 3:e8, 2015) and supplies a framework for understanding the results of Darmon et al. (2015), Bertolini et al. (2015) and Darmon and Rotger (J AMS 2016).

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