A Characterization Theorem for the $$L^{2}$$ L 2 -Discrepancy of Integer Points in Dilated Polygons

Abstract

Let C be a convex d-dimensional body. If \(\rho \) is a large positive number, then the dilated body \(\rho C\) contains \(\rho ^{d}\left| C\right| +\mathcal {O}\left( \rho ^{d-1}\right) \) integer points, where \(\left| C\right| \) denotes the volume of C. The above error estimate \(\mathcal {O}\left( \rho ^{d-1}\right) \) can be improved in several cases. We are interested in the \(L^{2}\)-discrepancy \(D_{C}(\rho )\) of a copy of \(\rho C\) thrown at random in \(\mathbb {R}^{d}\). More precisely, we consider Open image in new window where \(\mathbb {T}^{d}=\) \(\mathbb {R}^{d}/\mathbb {Z}^{d}\) is the d-dimensional flat torus and \(SO\left( d\right) \) is the special orthogonal group of real orthogonal matrices of determinant 1. An argument of Kendall shows that \(D_{C}(\rho )\le c\ \rho ^{(d-1)/2}\). If C also satisfies the reverse inequality \(\ D_{C}(\rho )\ge c_{1} \ \rho ^{(d-1)/2}\), we say that C is \(L^{2}\) -regular. Parnovski and Sobolev proved that, if \(d>1\), a d-dimensional unit ball is \(L^{2} \)-regular if and only if \(d\not \equiv 1\ ({\text {mod}}4)\). In this paper we characterize the \(L^{2}\)-regular convex polygons. More precisely, we prove that a convex polygon is not \(L^{2}\)-regular if and only if it can be inscribed in a circle and it is symmetric about the centre.