A note on the base-\(p\) expansions of putative counterexamples to the \(p\)-adic Littlewood conjecture (Q6536728)

The authors study the base \(p\) expansion of potential counterexamples to the \(p\)-adic Littlewood conjecture which states that for every \(x\in \mathbb{R}\), we have \(\inf_{q\in \mathbb{Z}}q\cdot \vert q\vert_p\cdot \Vert qx\Vert=0\). In particular, they find classes of words \(\{w_n\}_{n\in \mathbb{N}}\) over \(\{0,1,\dots,p-1\}\) such that \(\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}w_np^{-n}\) satisfies the \(p\)-adic Littlewood conjecture, and deduce that counterexamples must have a particular form. For instance, pure morphic words containing subwords of the form \(uXuXu\) (Proposition 2.8), words with infinitely long \(\alpha\) powers (Theorem 2.1), and words which contain suffixes of words satisfying the \(p\)-adic Littlewood conjecture, must also satisfy the \(p\)-adic Littlewood conjecture (Proposition 2.5). They also prove that if there is a counterexample to the \(p\)-adic Littlewood conjecture, then there exists a counterexample whose base \(p\) expansion is uniformly recurrent (Theorem 2.6). Furthermore, when \(p=2\), every pure morphic word satisfies the \(2\)-adic Littlewood conjecture.\N\NThe proof of Theorems 2.1 and 2.5 use combinatorial techniques, which yield good approximations to certain classes of words, that require them to satisfy the \(p\)-adic Littlewood conjecture. Proposition 2.5 and Theorem 2.6 are proved by equipping the set of suffixes of a word which satisfies the \(p\)-adic Littlewood conjecture with a topology, and showing that accumulation points of of a word satisfying the \(p\)-adic Littlewood, must also satisfy the \(p\)-adic Littlewood conjecture.