Integers representable as differences of linear recurrence sequences (Q2020008)

Pillai's Conjecture is an interesting problem in number theory. One can specialize this to an open problem as integers representable as differences of linear recurrence sequences. Let \(\{ U_n \}_{n \geq 0}\) and \(\{ V_m \}_{m \geq 0}\) be two linear recurrence sequences satisfying the dominant root condition with dominant roots \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\) respectively. Then, in the paper under review, the authors find an asymptotic formula for the number of integers \(c\) in the range \([-x, x]\) which can be represented as differences \(U_n - V_n\). More precisely, assume the setting above and let \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\) are multiplicatively independent and with the properties \(| \alpha |>1 \) and \(|\beta|>1\). Define \[ S(x):= \{ c \in [-x,x] : c=U_n - V_n \text{for some} (n, m) \in \mathbb{N}^2 \} \]. Then the authors are interested in understanding the asymptotic behaviour of \(S(x)\) and find \[ S(x) \sim \frac{(\log x)^2}{\log |\alpha| \log |\beta| } \] as \(x \to \infty\). More precisely, \[ \frac{(\log x)^2}{\log |\alpha| \log |\beta| } + O(\log x . \log \log x) \leq S(x) \leq \frac{(\log x)^2}{\log |\alpha| \log |\beta| } + O(\log x (\log \log x)^2 \] for \(x\) large enough. The implied constants are effective. Finally, they show that the density of such integers is \(0\). The proofs are based on effective usage of the linear forms in logarithms to bound for the number of solutions \((n, m)\) to the Diophantine inequality \(|U_n - V_m | \leq x\) and estimations on heights. Finally they propose three open interesting problems.