Building on ideas of Coleman and Rubin, we develop a general theory of Euler systems 'over Z' for the multiplicative group over number fields. This theory has a range of concrete consequences including both the proof of a long-standing distribution-theoretic conjecture of Coleman and also an elementary interpretation of, and thereby a more direct approach to proving, the equivariant Tamagawa number conjecture (eTNC) for Dirichlet L-functions at s = 0. In this way we obtain an unconditional proof of the 'minus part' of the eTNC over CM extensions of totally real fields, an easier proof of the eTNC over Q, a proof of the eTNC over imaginary quadratic fields conditional only on a standard µ-vanishing hypothesis, and strong new evidence for the eTNC over general number fields. As a key part of this approach, we show that higher-rank Euler systems for a wide class of p-adic representations satisfy one divisibility in the natural main conjecture.

We begin a systematic investigation of universal norms for p-adic representations in higher rank Iwasawa theory. After establishing the basic properties of the module of higher rank universal norms we construct an Iwasawa-theoretic pairing that is relevant to this setting. This allows us, for example, to refine the classical Iwasawa Main Conjecture for cyclotomic fields, and also to give applications to various well-known conjectures in arithmetic concerning Iwasawa invariants and leading terms of L-functions.

We investigate a question of Burns and Sano concerning the structure of the module of Euler systems for general p-adic representations. Assuming the weak Leopoldt conjecture, and the vanishing of µ-invariants of natural Iwasawa modules, we obtain an Iwasawa-theoretic classification criterion for Euler systems which can be used to study this module. This criterion, taken together with Coleman's conjecture on circular distributions, leads us to pose a refinement of the aforementioned question for which we provide strong, and unconditional, evidence. We furthermore answer this question in the affirmative in many interesting cases in the setting of the multiplicative group over number fields. As a consequence of these results, we derive explicit descriptions of the structure of the full collection of Euler systems for the situations in consideration.

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We prove a distribution-theoretic conjecture of Robert Coleman, thereby also obtaining an explicit description of the complete set of Euler systems for the multiplicative group over Q.