Inhomogeneous Diophantine approximation in the coprime setting (Q2274036)

Inhomogeneous coprime approximation was studied by \textit{J. H. H. Chalk} and \textit{P. Erdős} [Can. Math. Bull. 2, 91--96 (1959; Zbl 0088.25703)] who proved that, for any \(\alpha\in\mathbb{R}\backslash\mathbb{Q}\) and for any \(\gamma\in\mathbb{R}\), there are infinitely many pairs of coprime \((p,q)\in\mathbb{Z}\times\mathbb{N}\) such that: \[q\,|\gamma-q\alpha+p|\leq (\log q/\log\log q)^2\tag{*}\] holds. More recently, \textit{M. Laurent} and \textit{A. Nogueira} [Acta Arith. 154, No. 4, 413--427 (2012; Zbl 1273.11106)] conjectured that the right-hand side in (*) can be replaced by some constant \(C\in\mathbb{R}_+\), a result which would clearly be optimal. The present authors' first result is to show that such \(C\) does not exist. More precisely, one has the following Theorem 1. For any \(C\in\mathbb{R}_+\), there exists \((\alpha,\gamma)\in [0,1)^2\) with \(\alpha\in\mathbb{R} \backslash\mathbb{Q}\) and \(\gamma\notin\alpha\mathbb{Z}\times\mathbb{Z}\) such that the inequality \(q\,|\gamma-q\alpha+ p|\leq C\) has only finitely many coprime solutions \((p,q)\in\mathbb{N}^2\). To state the second main result, it is convenient to define, for given \(n\in\mathbb{N}\) and \(x\in\mathbb{R}\), \(||x-n\alpha||':=\min\{|x-n\alpha-m|:m\in\mathbb{Z},\gcd(m,n)=1\}\), and then has Theorem 2: For any \(\alpha\in\mathbb{R}\backslash\mathbb{Q}\), the relation \(\displaystyle\liminf_{n\to\infty}n\,||\gamma-n\alpha||'=0\) holds for almost every \(\gamma\in\mathbb{R}\).