Balancing numbers which are concatenation of two repdigits (Q2210312)

Balancing numbers \(n\), are solutions of the Diophantine equation \[1+ 2+ \cdots + (n-1) = (n+1)+ (n+2) +\cdots + (n+r), \] for some natural number \(r\), called the \textit{balancer} corresponding to \(n\). The sequence of balancing numbers \(\{B_n\}_{n\ge 0}\) is defined by the linear recurrence \(B_0=0\), \(B_1=1\), and \(B_{n+1}=6B_{n+1} - B_n\) for all \(n\ge 0\). The sequence of \textit{Lucas-balancing} numbers \(\{C_n\}_{n\ge 0}\) satisfy the same recurrence but with different initial terms \(C_0=1\) and \(C_1=3\). In the paper under review, the authors study the problem of finding all balancing numbers that are concatenations of two numbers with repeated digits (also known as \textit{repdigits}). More precisely, they completely solve the Diophantine equation \[ B_n = \overline{\underbrace{a\cdots a}_{m\text{-times}}\underbrace{b\cdots b}_{\ell\text{-times}}}=a\left(\dfrac{10^{m}-1}{9}\right)\cdot 10^{\ell}+b\left(\dfrac{10^{\ell}-1}{9}\right), \] in nonnegative integers \((a,b,\ell, m)\) with \(a,b \in \{0, 1, \ldots, 9\}, ~ a>0\). Their main result is the following. Theorem 1. The only balancing number which is a concatenation of two repdigits is \(35\). The proof of Theorem 1 follows from a clever combination of techniques in Diophantine number theory, elementary properties of balancing and Lucas-balancing sequences, the theory of linear forms in logarithms of algebraic numbers à la Baker, and the Baker-Davenport reduction procedure. Computations are done in \texttt{Mathematica}.