Insulators of ABC Solutions

Abstract

This note studies various ways of measuring the complexity of primitive solutions to the equation $A \,+\, B\, + \,C = 0$ and conjectures relating them. We define the insulator $\mathcal I(A,B,C)$ of a primitive solution as the smallest positive integer $\mathcal I$ such that the primes dividing the product $ABC \cdot \mathcal I$ are exactly those below a given bound. We show that the strong XYZ Conjecture of Lagarias and Soundararajan implies there are only finitely many primitive solutions $(A,B,C)$ with a given insulator.