Indecomposable integers in real quadratic fields (Q2307466): Difference between revisions

Let \(K\) be a number field, and let \({\mathcal O}_K\) be its ring of algebraic integers. Define by \({\mathcal O}_K^{+}\) the subset of \({\mathcal O}_K\) of \textit{indecomposable integers} consisting of algebraic integers that cannot be expressed by the sum of two elements of \({\mathcal O}_K^{+}\). Let \(D>1\) be a squarefree integer and let \(-N\) be the largest negative norm of the algebraic integers in \(K={\mathbb Q}(\sqrt{D})\). Let \(a\) be the smallest nonnegative rational integer such that \(a^2 \equiv D \pmod N\) if \(D \equiv 2, 3 \pmod 4\) and such that \(a^2 \equiv D \pmod {4N}\) if \(D \equiv 1 \pmod 4\). With this notation, in their main result (Theorem 4) the authors prove that the norm of each \(\alpha \in {\mathcal O}_K^{+}\) is less than \((D-a^2)/N+3\sqrt{D}/2\) if \(D \equiv 2, 3 \pmod 4\) and less than \((D-a^2)/(4N)+3\sqrt{D}/4\) if \(D \equiv 1 \pmod 4\). They also conjecture that in both cases their result holds with the second term being six times smaller (\(\sqrt{D}/4\) and \(\sqrt{D}/8\) respectively).