On fractional parts of powers of real numbers close to 1 (Q444175): Difference between revisions

The authors show that there exist arbitrarily small positive numbers \(\varepsilon\) such that for each positive integer \(n\) the distance from \((1+\varepsilon)^n\) to the nearest integer is at least \(2^{-17} \varepsilon/|\log \varepsilon|\). This is sharp up to the factor \(2^{-17}/|\log \varepsilon|\). The proof uses the idea of Peres and Schlag based on the Lovász local lemma. They also show that if \(\xi\) is a positive number, \(0 < \varepsilon<1\), and \((a_n)_{n=1}^{\infty}\) is any sequence of real numbers satisfying \(0 \leq a_n < 1-\varepsilon\) for each \(n \geq 1\) then the set of real numbers \(\alpha\) for which \(a_n \leq \{\xi \alpha^n\} \leq a_n+\varepsilon\) holds for every positive integer \(n\) has full Hausdorff dimension.