Diophantine approximation with prime restriction in real quadratic number fields

Abstract

The distribution of $$\alpha p$$ modulo one, where p runs over the rational primes and $$\alpha $$ is a fixed irrational real, has received a lot of attention. It is natural to ask for which exponents $$\nu >0$$ one can establish the infinitude of primes p satisfying $$||\alpha p||\le p^{-\nu }$$ . The latest record in this regard is Kaisa Matomäki’s landmark result $$\nu =1/3-\varepsilon $$ which presents the limit of currently known technology. Recently, Glyn Harman, and, jointly, Marc Technau and the first-named author, investigated the same problem in the context of imaginary quadratic fields. Glyn Harman obtained an analog for $$\mathbb {Q}(i)$$ of his result in the context of $$\mathbb {Q}$$ , which yields an exponent of $$\nu =7/22$$ . Marc Technau and the first-named author produced an analogue of Bob Vaughan’s result $$\nu =1/4-\varepsilon $$ for all imaginary quadratic number fields of class number 1. In the present article, we establish an analog of the last-mentioned result for real quadratic fields of class number 1 under a certain Diophantine restriction. This setting involves the additional complication of an infinite group of units in the ring of integers. Moreover, although the basic sieve approach remains the same (we use an ideal version of Harman’s sieve), the problem takes a different flavor since it becomes truly 2-dimensional. We reduce it eventually to a counting problem which is, interestingly, related to roots of quadratic congruences. To approximate them, we use an approach by Christopher Hooley based on the theory of binary quadratic forms.