Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 April 2009
This paper is concerned with non-trivial solvability in p–adic integers, for relatively large primes p, of a pair of additive equations of degree k > 1: where the coefficients a1,…, an, b1,…, bn are rational integers.
Our first theorem shows that the above equations have a non-trivial solution in p–adic integers if n > 4k and p > k6. The condition on n is best possible.
The later part of the paper obtains further information for the particular case k = 5. specifically we show that when k = 5 the above equations have a non-trivial solution in p–adic integers (a) for all p > 3061 if n ≥ 21; (b) for all p execpt p = 5, 11 if n ≥ 26.