Variants of Khintchine's theorem in metric Diophantine approximation

Abstract

New results towards the Duffin-Schaeffer conjecture, which is a fundamental unsolved problem in metric number theory, have been established recently assuming extra divergence. Given a non-negative function $\psi: \mathbb{N}\to\mathbb{R}$ we denote by $W(\psi)$ the set of all $x\in\mathbb{R}$ such that $|nx-a|<\psi(n)$ for infinitely many $a,n$. Analogously, denote $W'(\psi)$ if we additionally require $a,n$ to be coprime. Aistleitner et al. [1] proved that $W'(\psi)$ is of full Lebesgue measure if there exist an $\varepsilon>0$ such that $\sum_{n=2}^\infty\psi(n)\varphi(n)/(n(\log n)^\varepsilon)=\infty$. This result seems to be the best one can expect from the method used. Assuming the extra divergence $\sum_{n=2}^\infty\psi(n)/(\log n)^\varepsilon=\infty$ we prove that $W(\psi)$ is of full measure. This could also be deduced from the result in [1], but we believe that our proof is of independent interest, since its method is totally different from the one in [1]. As a further application of our method, we prove that a variant of Khintchine's theorem is true without monotonicity, subject to an additional condition on the set of divisors of the support of $\psi$.