On the Diophantine Inequality $\lvert x^{2} - 2^{a}\cdot 3^{b}\rvert < 3\max\{a,b\}$

Abstract

In this paper, we show that there are $57$ nonnegative integer solutions $(a,b,x)$ to the inequality $1\le \lvert x^{2} - 2^{a}\cdot 3^{b}\rvert < 3\max\{a, b\}$ and we list them explicitly. The inequality is converted into a statement about how closely $x/q$ approximates irrational number $\sqrt{d}$ for $d\in\{2,3,6\}$, where $q$ is an integer which is $3$-smooth, after which Worley&#39;s theorem on rational approximations via continued fractions is applied to parametrise the solutions and a $p$-adic lower bound for a linear form in logarithms due to Bugeaud and Laurent is applied to find a rather large bound on $\max\{a,b\}$. We finish with an application of the LLL algorithm to reduce this bound.