On the extensions of the Diophantine triples in Gaussian integers (Q2139072): Difference between revisions

A Diophantine \( m \)-tuple is a set of distinct integers such that the product of any two distinct elements plus \( 1 \) is a perfect square. In the paper under review, the authors study the extensibility of a Diophantine triple \( \{k-1, k+1, 16k^3-4k\} \) in Gaussian integers \( \mathbb{Z}[i]:=\{a+bi\mid a,b\in \mathbb{Z}\} \) to a Diophantine quadruple. More precisely, they prove the following theorem, which is the main result in the paper. Theorem 1. Let \( k\in \mathbb{Z}[i] \) such that \( \mathfrak{Re} ~k\ne 0 \) and \( |k|\ge 7\cdot 10^{37} \). Then, the Diophantine triple \( \{k-1, k+1, 16k^3-4k\} \) can be extended to a Diophantine quadruple only by \( d=4k \) or \( d=64k^5-48k^3+8k \). The authors approach the problem leading to Theorem 1 as follows: First, they assume that a Diophantine triple \( \{a,b,c\} \) in Gaussian integers \( \mathbb{Z}[i] \) can be extended with a fourth element \( d \) to form a Diophantine quadruple \( \{a,b,c,d\} \); Next, by eliminating \( d \) from the equations \( (ad+1=x^2,~bd+1=y^2, ~cd+1=z^2) \), the authors get a system of two Pell-type equations with common unknown; Further, they show that the structure of the solutions of the system of Pell equations is the same as that in the rational integers case. A solution of this system gives two simultaneous approximations of square roots close to \( 1 \). One can use Diophantine approximations in the general case by assuming that \( |c| \) is bigger than \( |b| \), say \( |c|>|b|^{15} \). However, the authors show that this is not useful for the Diophantine triple of the form \( \{k-1, k+1, 16k^3-4k\} \) considered in this paper; Finally, the authors also prove that the linear form in logarithms usually involved in approaching these problems is not zero under certain conditions. This can be useful in lowering the general bound, and also use it in this paper to partially resolve the extensibility problem of the Diophantine triple \( \{k-1, k+1, 16k^3-4k\} \).