On the complexity of a putative counterexample to the -adic Littlewood conjecture

• Published in: Compositio mathematica Vol. 151; no. 9; pp. 1647 - 1662
• Main Authors: Badziahin, Dmitry, Bugeaud, Yann, Einsiedler, Manfred, Kleinbock, Dmitry
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Foundation Compositio Mathematica 01.09.2015
• Subjects: Complexity; Integers; Mathematics; Prime numbers; Quotients; Real numbers; Sequences
• ISSN: 0010-437X; 1570-5846
• DOI: 10.1112/S0010437X15007393

Let $\Vert \cdot \Vert$ denote the distance to the nearest integer and, for a prime number $p$ , let $|\cdot |_{p}$ denote the $p$ -adic absolute value. Over a decade ago, de Mathan and Teulié [ Problèmes diophantiens simultanés , Monatsh. Math. 143 (2004), 229–245] asked whether $\inf _{q\geqslant 1}$ $q\cdot \Vert q{\it\alpha}\Vert \cdot |q|_{p}=0$ holds for every badly approximable real number ${\it\alpha}$ and every prime number $p$ . Among other results, we establish that, if the complexity of the sequence of partial quotients of a real number ${\it\alpha}$ grows too rapidly or too slowly, then their conjecture is true for the pair $({\it\alpha},p)$ with $p$ an arbitrary prime.