Diophantine approximations on projective spaces (Q1320046): Difference between revisions

To paraphrase from the author's introduction: In this paper we study diophantine approximations on projective spaces of arbitrary dimension. Especially we give a new proof for the results of W. M. Schmidt. Historically diophantine approximation has been the method for providing finiteness results in diophantine geometry. In the case of the projective line the fundamental result is Roth's theorem. This has been generalized to higher dimension by W. M. Schmidt. His basic result is the subspace theorem [cf. \textit{W. M. Schmidt}, ``Diophantine approximation'', Lect. Notes Math. 785 (1980; Zbl 0421.10019)]. However the proof is very complicated, and relies on deep results in the geometry of numbers. -- Recently a new development in the theory was started by Vojta which lead to a breakthrough for diophantine approximations on abelian varieties. He found a new way to use heights and the theorem of Mordell and Weil. His main insight was that on products of abelian varieties one has many more line bundles than just the product bundles. His discovery inspired \textit{G. Faltings} to find a new general result in the theory of diophantine approximations, the product theorem. It simplifies the theory very much and its application to abelian varieties leads to some generalization of Mordell's conjecture; as a second application G. Faltings also gave a lower bound for the distance of a rational point to a hypersurface on an abelian variety. In the present paper we study the consequences of the product theorem in the more classical case of projective spaces. Here not so many line bundles are available as for abelian varieties. Therefore the results will be much weaker in general. However, in the case Schmidt is considering the result is best possible up to an \(\varepsilon\). The advantage in the present situation is that we do not have to cope with complicated line bundles as in the abelian case; this simplifies the proofs considerably. On the other hand the estimates one needs have to be much more precise.