Effective bounds on S-integral preperiodic points for polynomials

Abstract: Given a polynomial

f

defined over a number field

K

, we make effective certain special cases of a conjecture of S. Ih, on the finiteness of

f

-preperiodic points which are

S

-integral with respect to a fixed non-preperiodic point

a l p h a

. As an application, we obtain bounds on the number of

S

-units in the doubly indexed sequence

{f^{n} (a l p h a) - f^{m} (a l p h a)}_{n > m g e q 0}

. In the case of a unicritical polynomial

f_{c} (z) = z^{2} + c

, with

a l p h a

fixed to be the critical point 0, for parameters

c

outside a small region, we give an explicit bound which depends only on the number of places of bad reduction for

f_{c}

. As part of the proof, we obtain novel lower bounds for the

v

-adically smallest preperiodic point of

f_{c}

for each place

v

of

K

.

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