Saturday, 27 January 2007

nt.number theory - S-unit equation and small sets of places

Let K be a number field, and let Sx denote the set of primes of norm at most x. Is it possible to find a smaller set of places TxsubsetSx so that a lot of the solutions of the Sx-unit equation a+b=1 for a,binSx are solutions of the Tx-unit equation?



Here's a possible precise statement (although I'd be interested in other formulations as well): Does there exist a constant 0<c<1, depending on K (but not x), so that for each x, there is a TxsubsetSx with |Tx|lesqrt|Sx| so that the number of solutions to the Tx-unit equation is at least c times the number of solutions of the Sx-unit equation?



I'm interested in this mostly by analogy: Bellabas and Gangl have a bound for the set of places of a number field one must check in order to compute K2 of the ring of integers. It would be interesting to know if one could at least get a pretty good approximation for K2 by looking at a much smaller set of places.

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