Diophantine inequality involving binary forms (Q5919184)

This paper is concerned with the study of Diophantine inequalities that are composed of binary forms. Let \(\phi_j\in \mathbb{Z}[x,y]\) for \(1\leq j\leq s\) be nondegenerate homogeneous forms of degree \(d=3\) or \(d=4\). Assume that \(\lambda_i\) for \(1\leq i\leq s\) are non-zero real numbers such that \(\frac{\lambda_1}{\lambda_2}\) is irrational, and the form \(\sum_{i=1}^s \lambda_i \phi_i(x_i,y_i)\) is indefinite. In this paper it is proved that under these assumptions, and for any \(\eta \in \mathbb{R}\) and \(\sigma< (2^{d-2}+1)^{-1}\) the Diophantine inequality \[ \left|\sum_{i=1}^s \lambda_i \phi_i(x_i,y_i) +\eta \right|< (\max_{1\leq i\leq s} \{|x_i|,|y_i|\})^{-\sigma}, \] has infinitely many integer solutions, as soon as \(s\geq 2^{d-1}+1\). The problem is motivated by work of \textit{T. D. Wooley} [Duke Math. J. 100, No. 3, 373--423 (1999; Zbl 1130.11312)] on Hua's lemma and exponential sums for binary forms. As before assume that \(\phi_j\in \mathbb{Z}[x,y]\) for \(1\leq j\leq s\) are homogeneous forms of degree \(d\) and non-zero discriminant. If \(s\) is sufficiently large (which means \(s>\max \{d^2, 2^{d-1}\}\) in the case \(d=3,4\)) and the form \(\sum_{i=1}^s \phi_i(x_i,y_i)\) is non-definite, then Wooley showed that the equation \(\sum_{i=1}^s \phi_i(x_i,y_i)=0\) has infinitely many integer solutions. More precisely, he obtained an asymptotic formula for the number of integer solutions. The proof of the main result of the paper under review is based on an application of the Davenport-Heilbronn circle method. It uses techniques and results from Wooley's work on binary forms. The proof crucially relies on estimates for the exponential sum \[ S(\alpha) = \sum_{x,y\sim X} e(\alpha \phi(x,y)), \] which are a form of Weyl's inequality and Hua's Lemma as stated in Theorem~1 and Theorem~2 in [Wooley, loc. cit.].