1 Introduction
Let $A=(a_{i,j})_{1\leqslant i,j\leqslant n}$ be a symmetric integral matrix with $n\geqslant 4$ . In other words,
with $a_{i,j}=a_{j,i}\in \mathbb{Z}$ for all $1\leqslant i<j\leqslant n$ . Let $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})$ be the quadratic form defined as
Let $t$ be an integer. We call $f$ regular if $A$ is invertible. For regular indefinite quadratic forms with $n\geqslant 4$ , the well-known Hasse principle asserts that $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})=t$ has integer solutions if and only if $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})=t$ has local solutions.
In this paper, we consider the equation $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})=t$ , where $x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n}$ are prime variables. It is expected that $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})=t$ has solutions with $x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n}$ primes if there are suitable local solutions. The classical theorem of Hua [Reference Hua7] deals with diagonal quadratic forms in five prime variables. In particular, every sufficiently large integer, congruent to 5 modulo 24, can be represented as a sum of five squares of primes. Recently, Liu [Reference Liu9] handled a wide class of quadratic forms $f$ with 10 or more prime variables. The general quadratic form in prime variables (or in dense sets) was recently investigated by Cook and Magyar [Reference Cook and Magyar3], and by Keil [Reference Keil8]. In particular, Cook and Magyar [Reference Cook and Magyar3] handled all regular quadratic forms in 21 or more prime variables, while the work of Keil [Reference Keil8] can deal with all regular quadratic forms in 17 or more variables. It involves only five prime variables for diagonal quadratic equation due to the effective mean value theorem. This is similar to the problem concerning Diophantine equations for cubic forms. The works of Baker [Reference Baker1], Vaughan [Reference Vaughan10, Reference Vaughan11] and Wooley [Reference Wooley13, Reference Wooley14] can deal with the diagonal cubic equation in seven variables. However, more variables are involved for general cubic forms. One can refer to the works of Heath-Brown [Reference Heath-Brown4, Reference Heath-Brown5] and Hooley [Reference Hooley6] for general cubic forms.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate general regular quadratic forms in nine or more prime variables. We define
where ${\rm\Lambda}(\cdot )$ is the von Mangoldt function. Our main result is the following.
Theorem 1.1. Suppose that $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})$ is a regular integral quadratic form with $n\geqslant 9$ , and that $t\in \mathbb{Z}$ . Let $\mathfrak{S}(f,t)$ and $\mathfrak{I}_{f,t}(X)$ be defined in (3.11) and (3.13), respectively. Suppose that $K$ is an arbitrary large real number. Then we have
where the implied constant depends on $f$ and $K$ .
Denote by $\mathbb{P}$ the set of all prime numbers. For a prime $p\in \mathbb{P}$ , we use $\mathbb{Z}_{p}$ to denote the ring of $p$ -adic integers. Then we use $\mathbb{U}_{p}$ to denote the set of $p$ -adic units in $\mathbb{Z}_{p}$ . The general local to global conjecture of Bourgain–Gamburd–Sarnak [Reference Bourgain, Gamburd and Sarnak2] asserts that $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})=t$ has prime solutions provided that there are local solutions in $\mathbb{U}_{p}$ for all $p\in \mathbb{P}$ . Liu [Reference Liu9, Theorem 1.1] verified this conjecture for a wide class of regular indefinite integral quadratic forms with ten or more variables. Theorem 1.1 has the following consequence improving upon Liu [Reference Liu9, Theorem 1.1].
Theorem 1.2. Let $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})$ be a regular indefinite integral quadratic form with $n\geqslant 9$ , and let $t\in \mathbb{Z}$ . Then $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})=t$ has prime solutions if we have the following two conditions:
-
(i) there are real solutions in $\mathbb{R}^{+}$ , and
-
(ii) there are local solutions in $\mathbb{U}_{p}$ for all prime $p$ .
We define $N_{f,t}^{\ast }(X)$ to be the number of prime solutions to $f(p_{1},\ldots ,p_{n})=t$ with $1\leqslant p_{1},\ldots ,p_{n}\leqslant X$ . Suppose that $f$ is regular with $n\geqslant 9$ . Actually, in view of Theorem 1.1, one has $N_{f,t}^{\ast }(X)\gg _{f,t}X^{n-2}\log ^{-n}X$ for sufficiently large $X$ if the conditions (i) and (ii) in Theorem 1.2 hold.
Theorem 1.2 covers all regular indefinite integral quadratic forms in nine prime variables. The $O$ -constant in the asymptotic formula (1.3) is independent of $t$ . Therefore, Theorem 1.1 can be applied to definite quadratic forms. In particular, if $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})$ is a positive definite integral quadratic form with $n\geqslant 9$ , then there exist $r,q\in \mathbb{N}$ so that all sufficiently large natural numbers $N$ , congruent to $r$ modulo $q$ , can be represented as $N=f(p_{1},\ldots ,p_{n})$ , where $p_{1},\ldots ,p_{n}$ are prime numbers.
The method in this paper can also be applied to refine Keil [Reference Keil8, Theorem 1.1]. In particular, one may obtain a variant of Keil [Reference Keil8, Theorem 1.1] for a wide class of quadratic forms in nine variables.
2 Notations
As usual, we write $e(z)$ for $e^{2{\it\pi}iz}$ . Throughout we assume that $X$ is sufficiently large. Let $L=\log X$ . We use $\ll$ and $\gg$ to denote Vinogradov’s well-known notations, while the implied constants may depend on the form $f$ . Denote by ${\it\phi}(q)$ Euler’s totient function.
For a set ${\mathcal{S}}$ in a field $\mathbb{F}$ , we define
We use $M_{m,n}({\mathcal{S}})$ to denote the set of $m$ by $n$ matrixes
and $GL_{n}({\mathcal{S}})$ to denote the set of invertible matrixes of order $n$
respectively. We define the off-diagonal rank of $A$ as
where
In other words, $\text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)$ is the maximal rank of a submatrix in $A$ , which does not contain any diagonal entries. For $\mathbf{x}=(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})^{T}\in \mathbb{N}^{n}$ , we write
For $\mathbf{x}=(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})^{T}\in \mathbb{Z}^{n}$ , we also use the notation ${\mathcal{A}}(\mathbf{x})$ to indicate that the argument ${\mathcal{A}}(x_{j})$ holds for all $1\leqslant j\leqslant s$ . The meaning will be clear from the text. For example, we use $1\leqslant \mathbf{x}\leqslant X$ and $|\mathbf{x}|\leqslant X$ to denote $1\leqslant x_{j}\leqslant X$ for $1\leqslant j\leqslant n$ and $|x_{j}|\leqslant X$ for $1\leqslant j\leqslant n$ , respectively.
In order to apply the circle method, we introduce the exponential sum
where $A$ is defined in (1.1). We define
where
The intervals ${\mathcal{M}}(q,a;Q)$ are pairwise disjoint for $1\leqslant a\leqslant q\leqslant Q$ and $(a,q)=1$ provided that $Q\leqslant X/2$ . For $Q\leqslant X/2$ , we set
Now we introduce the major arcs defined as
where $K$ is a sufficiently large constant throughout this paper. Then we define the minor arcs as
3 The contribution from the major arcs
For $q\in \mathbb{N}$ and $(a,q)=1$ , we define
where $A$ is given by (1.1). Throughout, we assume that $f$ is connected to $A$ given by (1.1) and (1.2). Let
Concerning $B_{f,t}(q)$ , we have the following multiplicative property.
Lemma 3.1. The arithmetic function $B_{f,t}(q)$ is multiplicative.
Proof. The desired conclusion can be proved by changing variables. ◻
Lemma 3.2. Suppose that $A$ is invertible. For any prime $p$ , there exists ${\it\gamma}_{p}={\it\gamma}_{p}(f,t)$ such that $B_{f,t}(p^{k})=0$ for all $k>{\it\gamma}_{p}$ . Moreover, if $p\nmid 2\det (A)$ , then we have ${\it\gamma}_{p}=1$ .
Proof. Throughout this proof, we assume that $(a,p)=1$ . We first deal with the case $p\geqslant 3$ . We claim that if
for some $j\leqslant (k-2)/2$ , then
Indeed, by changing variables, we obtain from (3.3) that
It follows from $j\leqslant (k-2)/2$ that $j\leqslant k-j-1$ and $k\leqslant 2(k-j-1)$ . Thus we deduce that
This establishes the desired claim, and therefore we arrive at
where $s=\lfloor k/2\rfloor$ . There exists $P\in GL_{n}(\mathbb{Z}_{p})$ with $\det (P)=1$ such that $P^{T}AP=D=\text{diag}\{d_{1},\ldots ,d_{n}\}$ with $d_{1},\ldots ,d_{n}\in \mathbb{Z}_{p}$ . Note that $A$ is invertible, one has $d_{1}\cdots d_{n}\not =0$ . In particular, we can choose $r\in \mathbb{N}$ such that $p^{r}\nmid d_{j}$ for all $1\leqslant j\leqslant n$ . The condition $A\mathbf{h}\equiv \mathbf{0}(\text{mod}~p^{s})$ implies $DP\mathbf{h}\equiv \mathbf{0}(\text{mod}~p^{s})$ . If $s\geqslant r$ , then $P\mathbf{h}\equiv \mathbf{0}(\text{mod}~p)$ . So we obtain $\mathbf{h}\equiv \mathbf{0}(\text{mod}~p)$ , which is a contradiction to the condition $(\mathbf{h},p)=1$ . Therefore, we conclude that
Moreover, when $p\nmid 2\det (A)$ , we can take $r=1$ in (3.6).
For $p=2$ , the above argument is still valid with minor modifications. We now claim that if
for some $j\leqslant (k-4)/4$ , then
This claim can be established by changing variables $\mathbf{h}=\mathbf{u}2^{k-2j-2}+\mathbf{v}$ with $\mathbf{u}(\text{mod}~2^{2})$ and $\mathbf{v}(\text{mod}~2^{k-2j-2})$ . The argument leading to (3.6) implies that there exists $k_{0}$ such that
The desired conclusion follows from (3.2), (3.6) and (3.9).◻
Lemma 3.3. Let $B_{f,t}(q)$ be defined as (3.2). If $A$ is invertible and $n\geqslant 5$ , then
Proof. In view of Lemma 3.2, it suffices to prove
for $p\nmid 2\det (A)$ and $(a,p)=1$ . Note that
where $A_{j}$ denotes the submatrix of $A$ by deleting the $j$ th row and $j$ th column, and $A_{ij}$ denotes the submatrix of $A_{j}$ by deleting the $i$ th row and $i$ th column. For complete Gauss sums, we have
where the implied constant depends on the square matrix $M$ . The estimate (3.10) follows by observing that $\text{rank}(A_{j})\geqslant 3$ and $\text{rank}(A_{ij})\geqslant 1$ . We complete the proof.◻
Now we introduce the singular series $\mathfrak{S}(f,t)$ defined as
where $B_{f,t}(q)$ is given by (3.2). From Lemmas 3.2 and 3.3, we conclude the following result.
Lemma 3.4. Suppose that $A$ is invertible and $n\geqslant 5$ . Then the singular series $\mathfrak{S}(f,t)$ is absolutely convergent, and
where the local densities ${\it\chi}_{p}(f,t)$ are defined as
Moreover, if $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})=t$ has local solutions in $\mathbb{U}_{p}$ for all prime $p$ , then one has
Proof. It suffices to explain $\mathfrak{S}(f,t)\gg 1$ provided that $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})=t$ has local solutions in $\mathbb{U}_{p}$ for all prime $p$ . Indeed, in view of Lemma 3.3, one has $\prod _{p\geqslant p_{0}}{\it\chi}_{p}(f,t)\gg 1$ for some $p_{0}$ . When $p<p_{0}$ , by Lemma 3.2, for some ${\it\gamma}={\it\gamma}_{p}$ we have
Since $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})=t$ has local solutions in $\mathbb{U}_{p}$ , one has ${\it\chi}_{p}(f,t)>0$ . This concludes that $\mathop{\prod }_{p}{\it\chi}_{p}(f,t)\gg 1$ .◻
Remark 3.5. We point out that in view of the proof of Lemmas 3.2–3.3, one has
where $q_{1}$ is square-free and $(2,q_{1}q_{2})=(q_{1},q_{2})=1$ . In particular, the singular series is absolutely convergent if $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 5$ . Therefore, the condition that $f$ is regular with $n\geqslant 9$ in our Theorem 1.1 can be replaced by $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ .
We define
Since $I({\it\beta})\ll X^{n}(1+X^{2}|{\it\beta}|)^{-2}$ for $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 5$ , we introduce the singular integral
where $f(\mathbf{x})=\mathbf{x}^{T}A\mathbf{x}$ . Note that $\mathfrak{I}_{f,t}(X)\gg _{f,t}X^{n-2}$ if $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})$ is indefinite and $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{n})=t$ has positive real solutions.
Lemma 3.6. Let $t\in \mathbb{Z}$ , and let
where $A\in M_{n,n}(\mathbb{Z})$ is a symmetric matrix with $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 5$ . Then one has
Proof. We write $f(\mathbf{x})$ for $\mathbf{x}^{T}A\mathbf{x}$ . By the definition of $\mathfrak{M}$ , one has
We introduce the congruence condition to deduce that
Since $q\leqslant P=L^{K}$ , the Siegel–Walfisz theorem together with summation by parts will imply for $(\mathbf{h},q)=1$ that
It follows from above
By putting (3.16) into (3.15), we obtain
It follows from $I({\it\beta})\ll X^{n}(1+X^{2}|{\it\beta}|)^{-2}$ that
and
Combining (3.17)–(3.19) together with Remark 3.5, we conclude
The proof of Lemma 3.6 is complete. ◻
4 Estimates for exponential sums
Lemma 4.1. Let $\{{\it\xi}_{z}\}$ be a sequence satisfying $|{\it\xi}_{z}|\leqslant 1$ . Then one has
Proof. We expand the square to deduce that
By changing variables, one can obtain
We complete the proof.◻
Lemma 4.2. For ${\it\alpha}\in \mathfrak{m}(Q)$ , one has
Proof. For ${\it\alpha}\in \mathfrak{m}(Q)$ , there exist $a$ and $q$ such that $1\leqslant a\leqslant q\leqslant 2Q$ , $(a,q)=1$ and $|{\it\alpha}-a/q|\leqslant 2Q(qX^{2})^{-1}$ . By a variant of Vaughan [Reference Vaughan12, Lemma 2.2] (see also Exercise 2 in Chapter 2 [Reference Vaughan12]), one has
Since ${\it\alpha}\in \mathfrak{m}(Q)$ , one has either $q>Q$ or $|{\it\alpha}-a/q|>Q(qX^{2})^{-1}$ . Then the desired estimate follows immediately.◻
Lemma 4.3. Let ${\it\alpha}\in \mathfrak{m}$ and ${\it\beta}\in \mathbb{R}$ . For $d\in \mathbb{Q}$ , we define
If $d\not =0$ , then one has
where the implied constant depends only on $d$ and $K$ .
Proof. The result is essentially classical. In particular, the method used to handle $\sum _{1\leqslant x\leqslant X}{\rm\Lambda}(x)e({\it\alpha}x^{2})$ can be modified to establish the desired conclusion. We only explain that the implied constant is independent of ${\it\beta}$ . By Vaughan’s identity, we essentially consider two types of exponential sums
and
By Cauchy’s inequality, to handle the summation (4.3), it suffices to deal with
One can apply the differencing argument to the summation of the type $\sum _{x}e({\it\alpha}^{\prime }x^{2}+x{\it\beta}^{\prime })$ as follows
This leads to the fact that the estimate (4.1) is uniformly for ${\it\beta}$ .◻
Lemma 4.4. Let ${\it\alpha}\in \mathfrak{m}(Q)$ . Suppose that $A$ is in the form
where $\text{rank}(B)\geqslant 3$ and $\text{rank}(C)\geqslant 2$ . Then we have
Remark 4.5. In view of the proof, the estimate (4.5) still holds provided that $\text{rank}(B)+\text{rank}(C)\geqslant 5$ .
Proof. By (4.4), we can write $S({\it\alpha})$ in the form
where $\mathbf{x}\in \mathbb{N}^{r}$ , $\mathbf{y}\in \mathbb{N}^{s}$ and $\mathbf{z}\in \mathbb{N}^{t}$ . Then we have
By Cauchy’s inequality, we obtain
We deduce by expanding the square that
where ${\it\xi}(\mathbf{x}_{1},\mathbf{x}_{2})$ is defined as
We write
Since $\text{rank}(B)\geqslant 3$ , without loss of generality, we assume that $\text{rank}(B_{0})=3$ , where $B_{0}=(b_{i,j})_{1\leqslant i,j\leqslant 3}$ . Let $B^{\prime }=(b_{i,j})_{4\leqslant i\leqslant r,1\leqslant j\leqslant 3}$ . Then one has
where $\mathbf{u}^{T}=(h_{1},h_{2},h_{3})$ , $\mathbf{v}^{T}=(y_{1},y_{2},y_{3})$ and $\mathbf{k}^{T}=(h_{4},\ldots ,h_{r})B^{\prime }$ . By changing variables $\mathbf{x}^{T}=2(\mathbf{u}^{T}B_{0}+\mathbf{k}^{T})$ , we obtain
We apply Lemma 4.2 to conclude that
and therefore,
Similar to (4.7), we can prove
Lemma 4.6. Suppose that $A$ is in the form (4.4) with $\text{rank}(B)\geqslant 3$ and $\text{rank}(C)\geqslant 2$ . Then we have
Proof. By Dirichlet’s approximation theorem, for any ${\it\alpha}\in [X^{-1},1+X^{-1}]$ , there exist $a$ and $q$ with $1\leqslant a\leqslant q\leqslant X$ and $(a,q)=1$ such that $|{\it\alpha}-a/q|\leqslant (qX)^{-1}$ . Thus the desired conclusion follows from Lemma 4.4 by the dyadic argument.◻
5 Quadratic forms with off-diagonal rank ${\leqslant}3$
Proposition 5.1. Let $A$ be given by (1.1), and let $S({\it\alpha})$ be defined in (2.5). Suppose that $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ and $\text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)\leqslant 3$ . Then we have
where the implied constant depends on $A$ and $K$ .
From now on, we assume throughout Section 5 that $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ and
where
Then we introduce $B_{1},B_{2},B_{3}\in M_{3,n-4}(\mathbb{Z})$ defined as
and
Subject to the assumption (5.1), we have the following.
Lemma 5.2. If $\text{rank}(B_{1})=\text{rank}(B_{2})=\text{rank}(B_{3})=2$ , then one has
Lemma 5.3. If $\text{rank}(B_{1})=\text{rank}(B_{2})=2$ and $\text{rank}(B_{3})=3$ , then one has
Lemma 5.4. If $\text{rank}(B_{1})=2$ and $\text{rank}(B_{2})=\text{rank}(B_{3})=3$ , then one has
Lemma 5.5. If $\text{rank}(B_{1})=\text{rank}(B_{2})=\text{rank}(B_{3})=3$ , then one has
Remark for the Proof of Proposition 5.1.
If $\text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)=0$ , then $A$ is a diagonal matrix and the conclusion is classical. When $\text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)=3$ , our conclusion follows from Lemmas 5.2–5.5 immediately. The method applied to establish Lemmas 5.2–5.5 can also be used to deal with the case $1\leqslant \text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)\leqslant 2$ . Indeed, the proof of Proposition 5.1 under the condition $1\leqslant \text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)\leqslant 2$ is easier, and we omit the details. Therefore, our main task is to establish Lemmas 5.2–5.5.
Lemma 5.6. Let $C\in M_{n,n}(\mathbb{Q})$ be a symmetric matrix, and let $H\in M_{n,k}(\mathbb{Q})$ . For ${\it\alpha}\in \mathbb{R}$ and ${\bf\beta}\in \mathbb{R}^{k}$ , we define
where ${\mathcal{X}}\subset \mathbb{Z}^{n}$ is a finite subset of $\mathbb{Z}^{n}$ . Let
Then we have
where the implied constant may depend on $C$ and $H$ .
Proof. We can choose a natural number $h\in \mathbb{N}$ such that $hC\in M_{n,n}(\mathbb{Z})$ and $hH\in M_{n,k}(\mathbb{Z})$ . Then we deduce that
By orthogonality, we have
Therefore, one obtains
and this completes the proof. ◻
Lemma 5.7. Let $C\in M_{n,n}(\mathbb{Q})$ be a symmetric matrix, and let $H\in M_{n,k}(\mathbb{Q})$ . We have
where
Proof. By changing variables $\mathbf{x}-\mathbf{y}=\mathbf{h}$ and $\mathbf{x}+\mathbf{y}=\mathbf{z}$ , the desired conclusion follows immediately.◻
The following result is well known.
Lemma 5.8. Let $C\in M_{k,m}(\mathbb{Q})$ . If $\text{rank}(C)\geqslant 2$ , then one has
where the implied constant depends on the matrix $C$ .
5.1 Proof of Lemma 5.2
Lemma 5.9. If $\text{rank}(B_{1})=\text{rank}(B_{2})=\text{rank}(B_{3})=2$ , then we can write $A$ in the form
where $B\in GL_{3}(\mathbb{Z})$ , $C\in M_{3,n-6}(\mathbb{Z})$ and $D=\text{diag}\{d_{1},\ldots ,d_{n-6}\}$ is a diagonal matrix.
Proof. We write for $1\leqslant j\leqslant n-3$ that
Since $B=({\it\gamma}_{1},{\it\gamma}_{2},{\it\gamma}_{3})\in GL_{3}(\mathbb{Z})$ , ${\it\gamma}_{1}$ , ${\it\gamma}_{2}$ and ${\it\gamma}_{3}$ are linearly independent. For any $4\leqslant j\leqslant n-3$ , one has $\text{rank}({\it\gamma}_{2},{\it\gamma}_{3},{\it\gamma}_{j})\leqslant \text{rank}(B_{1})=2$ . Therefore, we obtain ${\it\gamma}_{j}\in <{\it\gamma}_{2},{\it\gamma}_{3}>$ . Similarly, one has ${\it\gamma}_{j}\in <{\it\gamma}_{1},{\it\gamma}_{3}>$ and ${\it\gamma}_{j}\in <{\it\gamma}_{1},{\it\gamma}_{2}>$ . Then we can conclude that ${\it\gamma}_{j}=0$ for $4\leqslant j\leqslant n-3$ .
For $7\leqslant i<j\leqslant n$ , we write
Since $3\leqslant \text{rank}(B_{i,j})\leqslant \text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)=3$ , we conclude that ${\it\eta}_{4}^{T}$ can be linearly represented by ${\it\eta}_{1}^{T}$ , ${\it\eta}_{2}^{T}$ and ${\it\eta}_{3}^{T}$ . Then we obtain $a_{i,j}=0$ due to $a_{1,j}=a_{2,j}=a_{3,j}=0$ . Therefore, the matrix $A$ is in the form (5.6). We complete the proof.◻
Proof of Lemma 5.2.
By Lemma 5.9, we have
By orthogonality, we have
where ${\bf\beta}=({\it\beta}_{1},{\it\beta}_{2},{\it\beta}_{3})^{T}$ and we use $d{\bf\beta}$ to denote $d{\it\beta}_{1}\,d{\it\beta}_{2}\,d{\it\beta}_{3}$ . We define
and
where ${\it\xi}_{j}=(a_{4,6+j},a_{5,6+j},a_{6,6+j})^{T}$ for $1\leqslant j\leqslant n-6$ . On writing $I_{3}=(\mathbf{e}_{1},\mathbf{e}_{2},\mathbf{e}_{3})$ , we introduce
where ${\it\gamma}_{j}^{T}=(a_{3+j,4},a_{3+j,5},a_{3+j,6})$ for $1\leqslant j\leqslant 3$ . With above notations, we have
Therefore, one has the following inequality
We first consider the case $\text{rank}(D)\geqslant 3$ . Without loss of generality, we assume $d_{1}d_{2}d_{3}\not =0$ . By (5.8) and the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality, one has
where
and
By Lemmas 5.6 and 5.7, one has
Since $B$ is invertible, we obtain
Then we conclude from Lemma 5.8 that
It follows from Lemmas 5.6–5.7 that
where $\mathbf{y}=(y_{1},y_{2},y_{3})^{T}$ , $\mathbf{y}^{\prime }=(y_{1}^{\prime },y_{2}^{\prime },y_{3}^{\prime })^{T}$ and $\mathbf{w}^{\prime }=(w_{1}^{\prime },w_{2}^{\prime },w_{3}^{\prime })^{T}$ . Then by Lemma 5.8, we have
Since $d_{3}\not =0$ , we obtain by Lemma 4.3
and thereby
Now we conclude from (5.9), (5.12)–(5.14) that
Next we consider the case $1\leqslant \text{rank}(D)\leqslant 2$ . Without loss of generality, we suppose that $d_{1}\not =0$ and $d_{k}=0$ for $3\leqslant k\leqslant n$ . Since $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ , there exists $k$ with $3\leqslant k\leqslant n-6$ such that ${\it\xi}_{k}\not =0\in \mathbb{Z}^{3}$ . Then we can find $i,j$ with $1\leqslant i<j\leqslant 3$ so that $\text{rank}(\mathbf{e}_{i},\mathbf{e}_{j},{\it\xi}_{k})=3$ . Without loss of generality, we can assume that $i=1,j=2$ and $k=3$ . One has
We deduce from Lemmas 5.6–5.7 that
Then by Lemma 5.8, one has
We deduce from Lemmas 5.6–5.7 again that
On applying $\text{rank}(\mathbf{e}_{1},\mathbf{e}_{2},{\it\xi}_{3})=3$ and Lemma 5.8, we obtain
It follows from Lemma 4.3 that
Then we conclude from (5.15)–(5.17) that
Now it suffices to assume $D=0$ . Then the matrix $A$ is in the form
It follows from $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ that $\text{rank}(C)\geqslant 3$ . By Lemma 4.6,
This completes the proof of Lemma 5.2.
5.2 Proof of Lemma 5.3
Lemma 5.10. If $\text{rank}(B_{1})=\text{rank}(B_{2})=2$ and $\text{rank}(B_{3})=3$ , then the symmetric integral matrix $A$ can be written in the form
where $C=({\it\gamma}_{1},{\it\gamma}_{2})\in M_{3,2}(\mathbb{Z})$ , ${\it\gamma}_{3}\in \mathbb{Q}^{3}$ , ${\it\xi}\in \mathbb{Z}^{n-5}$ , $V\in M_{2,n-5}(\mathbb{Z})$ , $h\in \mathbb{Q}$ and $D=\text{diag}\{d_{1},\ldots ,d_{n-5}\}\in M_{n-5,n-5}(\mathbb{Q})$ is a diagonal matrix. Moreover, one has $({\it\gamma}_{1},{\it\gamma}_{2},{\it\gamma}_{3})\in GL_{3}(\mathbb{Q})$ .
Proof. Let us write
Since $\text{rank}({\it\gamma}_{1}^{\prime },{\it\gamma}_{2}^{\prime },{\it\gamma}_{3}^{\prime })=\text{rank}(B)=3$ , we conclude that ${\it\gamma}_{1}^{\prime }$ , ${\it\gamma}_{2}^{\prime }$ and ${\it\gamma}_{3}^{\prime }$ are linearly independent. For any $4\leqslant j\leqslant n-3$ , we deduce from $\text{rank}(B_{1})=\text{rank}(B_{2})=2$ that ${\it\gamma}_{j}^{\prime }\in <{\it\gamma}_{2}^{\prime },{\it\gamma}_{3}^{\prime }>\cap <{\it\gamma}_{1}^{\prime },{\it\gamma}_{3}^{\prime }>=<{\it\gamma}_{3}^{\prime }>$ . Therefore, we can write $A$ in the form
where $C=({\it\gamma}_{1},{\it\gamma}_{2})\in M_{3,2}(\mathbb{Z})$ , ${\it\gamma}_{3}\in \mathbb{Q}^{3}$ , ${\it\xi}\in \mathbb{Z}^{n-5}$ , $V\in M_{2,n-5}(\mathbb{Z})$ and $A_{3}\in M_{n-5,n-5}(\mathbb{Q})$ .
For $6\leqslant j\leqslant n$ . we define ${\it\eta}_{j}^{T}=(a_{j,4},\ldots ,a_{j,j-1},a_{j,j+1},\ldots ,a_{j,n})^{T}\in \mathbb{Z}^{n-4}$ . Then we set ${\it\theta}_{i,j}^{T}=(a_{i,4},\ldots ,a_{i,j-1},a_{i,j+1},\ldots ,a_{i,n})^{T}\in \mathbb{Z}^{n-4}$ for $1\leqslant i\leqslant 3$ . Since $\text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)=\text{rank}(B)=\text{rank}(B_{3})=3$ , ${\it\eta}_{j}$ can be linearly represented by ${\it\theta}_{1,j}$ , ${\it\theta}_{2,j}$ and ${\it\theta}_{3,j}$ . Let
Then one can choose $a_{j,j}^{\prime }\in \mathbb{Q}$ such that $(a_{j,4},\ldots ,a_{j,j-1},a_{j,j}^{\prime },a_{j,j+1},\ldots ,a_{j,n})$ is linearly represented by ${\it\theta}_{1}$ , ${\it\theta}_{2}$ and ${\it\theta}_{3}$ . We consider $A_{3}$ and $A_{3}^{\prime }$ defined as
where $a_{i,j}^{\prime }=a_{i,j}$ for $6\leqslant i\not =j\leqslant n$ . Since $A_{3}^{\prime }$ is symmetric, we conclude from above that $A_{3}^{\prime }=h{\it\xi}{\it\xi}^{T}$ for some $h\in \mathbb{Q}$ . The proof is completed by noting that $D=A_{3}-A_{3}^{\prime }$ is a diagonal matrix.◻
Proof of Lemma 5.3.
One can deduce from Lemma 5.10 that
We introduce new variables $\mathbf{w}\in \mathbb{Z}^{2}$ and $s\in \mathbb{Z}$ to replace $2\mathbf{x}^{T}C+\mathbf{y}^{T}A_{2}+2\mathbf{z}^{T}V^{T}$ and ${\it\xi}^{T}\mathbf{z}$ , respectively. Therefore, we have
where ${\bf\beta}^{\prime }=({\it\beta}_{1},{\it\beta}_{2})^{T}$ , ${\bf\beta}=({\it\beta}_{1},{\it\beta}_{2},{\it\beta}_{3})^{T}$ and $d{\bf\beta}=d{\it\beta}_{1}\,d{\it\beta}_{2}\,d{\it\beta}_{3}$ . We define
On writing $I_{2}=(\mathbf{e}_{1},\mathbf{e}_{2})$ , we introduce
where ${\it\rho}_{j}=(a_{3+j,4},a_{3+j,5})^{T}$ for $1\leqslant j\leqslant 2$ . Let ${\it\xi}=({\it\epsilon}_{1},\ldots ,{\it\epsilon}_{n-5})^{T}$ . Then we define
where $V=({\it\upsilon}_{1},\ldots ,{\it\upsilon}_{n-5})$ with ${\it\upsilon}_{j}=(a_{4,5+j},a_{5,5+j})^{T}$ for $1\leqslant j\leqslant n-5$ . With above notations, we obtain
Let
and
By (5.19) and the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality, one has for $i\not =j$ that
One can deduce by Lemmas 5.6 and 5.7 that
Note that
Recalling $\text{rank}(C,{\it\gamma}_{3})=3$ , one can replace $\mathbf{x}$ by $-(z{\it\upsilon}_{i}^{T},-s)(C,{\it\gamma}_{3})^{-1}$ . Therefore, by Lemma 5.8, one has
The argument leading to (5.16) also implies
Now we are able to handle the case $\text{rank}(D)\geqslant 2$ . Since $\text{rank}(B_{3})=3$ , one has ${\it\epsilon}_{l}\not =0$ for some $l$ satisfying $2\leqslant l\leqslant n-5$ . We may assume ${\it\epsilon}_{2}\not =0$ . We also have ${\it\epsilon}_{1}\not =0$ due to $\text{rank}(B)=3$ . If $d_{l}\not =0$ for some $l\geqslant 3$ , then we can find $i,j,k$ pairwise distinct so that ${\it\epsilon}_{j}\not =0$ and $d_{i}d_{k}\not =0$ . If $d_{1}d_{2}\not =0$ and ${\it\epsilon}_{j}\not =0$ for some $j\geqslant 3$ , then we can also find $i,j,k$ pairwise distinct so that ${\it\epsilon}_{j}\not =0$ and $d_{i}d_{k}\not =0$ . In these cases, we can conclude from (5.20)–(5.22) that
Next we assume $d_{l}={\it\epsilon}_{l}=0$ for all $l\geqslant 3$ . Then we can represent $A$ in the form
where $H\in M_{3,4}(\mathbb{Z})$ , $Y\in M_{4,4}(\mathbb{Z})$ and $W\in M_{4,n-7}(\mathbb{Z})$ . It follows from $\text{rank}(B)=3$ and $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ that $\text{rank}(H)\geqslant 3$ and $\text{rank}(W)\geqslant 2$ . We apply Lemma 4.6 to conclude
We are left to handle the case $\text{rank}(D)\leqslant 1$ . Since $\text{rank}(D)+\text{rank}(V)+1+5\geqslant \text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ , we obtain $\text{rank}(D)\geqslant 1$ . Therefore, $\text{rank}(D)=1$ . We have
where
and
Since $\text{rank}(C)\geqslant 3$ , we can represent two of $x_{1},x_{2},x_{3}$ (say $x_{1}$ and $x_{2}$ ) in terms of $x_{3}$ , $y$ and $w$ . Then by Lemma 5.8, one has
We deduce from Lemma 5.10 that $\text{rank}\left(\begin{array}{@{}c@{}}{\it\xi}^{T}\\ V\end{array}\right)\geqslant \text{rank}(A)-5-\text{rank}(D)\geqslant 3$ . Therefore, there exist distinct $i,j,k,s$ such that $\text{rank}\left(\begin{array}{@{}ccc@{}}{\it\upsilon}_{i}^{T} & {\it\upsilon}_{j}^{T} & {\it\upsilon}_{k}^{T}\\ {\it\epsilon}_{i} & {\it\epsilon}_{j} & {\it\epsilon}_{k}\end{array}\right)=3$ and $d_{s}\not =0$ . By Lemmas 5.6–5.7, we also have
Hence we can replace $z_{1},z_{2}$ and $z_{3}$ by linear functions of $y$ and $w$ , and it follows that
Hence we can obtain again that
The proof of Lemma 5.3 is finished.
5.3 Proof of Lemma 5.4
The proof of Lemma 5.10 can be modified to establish the following result. The detail of the proof is omitted.
Lemma 5.11. If $\text{rank}(B_{1})=2$ and $\text{rank}(B_{2})=\text{rank}(B_{3})=3$ , then we can write $A$ in the form
where ${\it\gamma}_{1}\in \mathbb{Z}^{3}$ , ${\it\gamma}_{2},{\it\gamma}_{3}\in \mathbb{Q}^{3}$ , $C\in M_{2,n-4}(\mathbb{Z})$ , $a\in \mathbb{Z}$ , ${\it\upsilon}\in \mathbb{Z}^{n-4}$ , $H\in M_{2,2}(\mathbb{Q})$ and $D=\text{diag}\{d_{1},\ldots ,d_{n-4}\}\in M_{n-4,n-4}(\mathbb{Q})$ is a diagonal matrix. Moreover, one has $({\it\gamma}_{1},{\it\gamma}_{2},{\it\gamma}_{3})\in GL_{3}(\mathbb{Q})$ .
Lemma 5.12. Let $A$ be given by (5.26). We write
Let
Under the conditions in Lemma 5.11, one can find pairwise distinct $i,j,k,u$ with $1\leqslant i,j,k,u\leqslant n-4$ such that at least one of the following two statements holds: (i) $\text{rank}(R_{i,j,k})=3$ and $d_{u}\not =0$ ; (ii) $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{i},{\it\xi}_{j})=2$ and $d_{k}d_{u}\not =0$ .
Proof. It follows from $9\leqslant \text{rank}(A)\leqslant \text{rank}(D)+\text{rank}({\it\upsilon})+\text{rank}(C)+4$ that $\text{rank}(D)\geqslant 2$ . If $\text{rank}(D)=2$ , say $d_{1}d_{2}\not =0$ , then $\text{rank}(R)\geqslant 3$ , where
Then statement (i) holds. Next we assume $\text{rank}(D)\geqslant 3$ . Note that $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{1},{\it\xi}_{2})=2$ due to $\text{rank}(B)=3$ . If $d_{r}d_{s}\not =0$ for some $r>s\geqslant 3$ , then statement (ii) follows by choosing $i=1,j=2,k=r$ and $u=s$ . Therefore, we now assume that $\text{rank}(D)=3$ and $d_{1}d_{2}\not =0$ . Without loss of generality, we suppose that $d_{3}\not =0$ and $d_{s}=0(4\leqslant s\leqslant n-4)$ . We consider $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{1},{\it\xi}_{s})$ and $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{2},{\it\xi}_{s})$ for $4\leqslant s\leqslant n-4$ . If $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{1},{\it\xi}_{s})=2$ for some $s$ with $4\leqslant s\leqslant n-4$ , then one can choose $i=1$ , $j=s$ $k=2$ and $u=3$ to establish statement (ii). Similarly, statement (ii) follows if $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{2},{\it\xi}_{s})=2$ for some $s$ with $4\leqslant s\leqslant n-4$ . Thus it remains to consider the case $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{1},{\it\xi}_{s})=\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{2},{\it\xi}_{s})=1$ for $4\leqslant s\leqslant n-4$ . However, it follows from $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{1},{\it\xi}_{2})=\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{1},{\it\xi}_{2},{\it\xi}_{s})=2$ that ${\it\xi}_{s}=0$ , and this is contradictory to the condition $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ . We complete the proof of Lemma 5.12.◻
Proof of Lemma 5.4.
We deduce from Lemma 5.11 that
We introduce new variables $w\in \mathbb{Z}$ and $\mathbf{h}\in \mathbb{Z}^{2}$ to replace $2\mathbf{x}^{T}{\it\gamma}_{1}+ay+2\mathbf{z}^{T}{\it\upsilon}^{T}$ and $C\mathbf{z}$ , respectively. Therefore, we have
where ${\bf\beta}=({\it\beta}_{1},{\it\beta}_{2},{\it\beta}_{3})^{T}$ , ${\bf\beta}^{\prime }=({\it\beta}_{2},{\it\beta}_{3})^{T}$ and $d{\bf\beta}=d{\it\beta}_{1}\,d{\it\beta}_{2}\,d{\it\beta}_{3}$ . Now we introduce
and
On recalling notations in (5.27), we define
Then we obtain from above
One can deduce from Lemmas 5.6 and 5.7 that
If $\text{rank}(R_{i,j,k})=3$ , then we can represent $z_{i},z_{j}$ and $z_{k}$ by linear functions of $y$ and $w$ . Then by Lemma 5.8,
If $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{i},{\it\xi}_{j})=2$ , then we can represent $z_{i},z_{j}$ and $w$ by linear functions of $y$ and $z_{k}$ . Then we obtain by Lemma 5.8 again
provided that $d_{k}\not =0$ . By Lemmas 5.6–5.7, we can obtain
Then we deduce that
On invoking Lemma 5.8, we arrive at
If $1\leqslant i,j,k\leqslant n-4$ are pairwise distinct, then one has by (5.29) and the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality
Now it follows from above together with Lemmas 4.3 and 5.12 that
We complete the proof of Lemma 5.4.
5.4 Proof of Lemma 5.5
Similar to Lemmas 5.9–5.11, we also have the following result.
Lemma 5.13. If $\text{rank}(B_{1})=\text{rank}(B_{2})=\text{rank}(B_{3})=3$ , then we can write $A$ in the form
where $C\in M_{3,n-3}(\mathbb{Z})$ , ${\it\gamma}_{1},{\it\gamma}_{2},{\it\gamma}_{3}\in \mathbb{Q}^{3}$ , $H\in M_{3,3}(\mathbb{Q})$ and $D=\text{diag}\{d_{1},\ldots ,d_{n-3}\}\in M_{n-3,n-3}(\mathbb{Q})$ is a diagonal matrix. Furthermore, we have $({\it\gamma}_{1},{\it\gamma}_{2},{\it\gamma}_{3})\in GL_{3}(\mathbb{Q})$ .
Lemma 5.14. Let $A$ be given by (5.30) satisfying the conditions in Lemma 5.13. We write
Then we can find pairwise distinct $u_{j}(1\leqslant j\leqslant 6)$ with $1\leqslant u_{1},u_{2},u_{3},u_{4},u_{5},u_{6}\leqslant n-3$ so that $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{u_{1}},{\it\xi}_{u_{2}},{\it\xi}_{u_{3}})=3$ and $d_{u_{4}}d_{u_{5}}d_{u_{6}}\not =0$ .
Proof. It follows from $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ that $\text{rank}(D)\geqslant 3$ . If $\text{rank}(D)=3$ , then we may assume that $d_{1}d_{2}d_{3}\not =0$ and $d_{j}=0$ for $j\geqslant 4$ . Thus $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{4},\ldots ,{\it\xi}_{n-3})=3$ , and the desired conclusion follows. Next we assume $\text{rank}(D)\geqslant 4$ . Since $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{1},{\it\xi}_{2},{\it\xi}_{3})=3$ , the desired conclusion follows again if there are distinct $k_{1},k_{2}$ and $k_{3}$ such that $d_{k_{1}}d_{k_{2}}d_{k_{3}}\not =0$ and $k_{1},k_{2},k_{3}\geqslant 4$ . Thus we now assume that for any distinct $k_{1},k_{2},k_{3}\geqslant 4$ , one has $d_{k_{1}}d_{k_{2}}d_{k_{3}}=0$ . This yields $\text{rank}(D)\leqslant 5$ . We first consider the case $\text{rank}(D)=4$ . There are at least two distinct $j_{1},j_{2}\leqslant 3$ such that $d_{j_{1}}d_{j_{2}}\not =0$ . Suppose that $d_{s_{i}}=0$ for $1\leqslant i\leqslant n-7$ . Then the rank of $\{{\it\xi}_{s_{i}}\}_{1\leqslant i\leqslant n-7}$ is at least 2, say $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{s_{1}},{\it\xi}_{s_{2}})=2$ . Since $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{1},{\it\xi}_{2},{\it\xi}_{3})=3$ , we can find $j$ with $1\leqslant j\leqslant 3$ such that $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{j},{\it\xi}_{s_{1}},{\it\xi}_{s_{2}})=3$ . The desired conclusion follows easily by choosing $u_{1}=j$ , $u_{2}=s_{1}$ and $u_{3}=s_{2}$ . Now we consider the case $\text{rank}(D)=5$ , and we may assume that $d_{1}d_{2}d_{3}d_{4}d_{5}\not =0$ and $d_{r}=0$ for $r\geqslant 6$ . Since $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ , there exist $r\geqslant 6$ (say $r=6$ ) such that ${\it\xi}_{r}\not =0$ . Then one can choose $j_{1},j_{2}\leqslant 3$ so that $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{j_{1}},{\it\xi}_{j_{2}},{\it\xi}_{6})=3$ . The desired conclusion follows by choosing $u_{1}=j_{1}$ , $u_{2}=j_{2}$ and $u_{3}=6$ . The proof of Lemma 5.14 is completed.◻
Proof of Lemma 5.5.
We apply Lemma 5.13 to conclude that
By orthogonality, one has
where ${\bf\beta}=({\it\beta}_{1},{\it\beta}_{2},{\it\beta}_{3})^{T}$ and $d{\bf\beta}=d{\it\beta}_{1}\,d{\it\beta}_{2}\,d{\it\beta}_{3}$ . Now we introduce
and
where ${\it\xi}_{1},\ldots ,{\it\xi}_{n-3}$ is given by (5.31). We conclude from above
One applying Lemmas 5.6–5.8, we can easily establish
provided that $\text{rank}({\it\xi}_{u_{1}},{\it\xi}_{u_{2}},{\it\xi}_{u_{3}})=3$ and $d_{u_{4}}d_{u_{5}}\not =0$ . Similarly, we also have
By (5.32) and the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality, one has for distinct $u_{1},u_{2},u_{3},u_{4}$ and $u_{5}$ that
Combining (5.33)–(5.35), Lemma 4.3 and Lemma 5.14, one has
The proof of Lemma 5.5 is finished.
6 Quadratic forms with off-diagonal rank ${\geqslant}4$
Proposition 6.1. Let $A$ be defined in (1.1), and let $S({\it\alpha})$ be defined in (2.5). We write
Suppose that $\det (G)\not =0$ . Then we have
where the implied constant depends on $A$ and $K$ .
Throughout this section, we shall assume that the matrix $G$ given by (6.1) is invertible.
Lemma 6.2. Let ${\it\tau}\not =0$ be a real number. Then we have
where the implied constant depends on ${\it\tau}$ .
Proof. Without loss of generality, we assume that $0<|{\it\tau}|\leqslant 1$ . Thus $|{\it\tau}({\it\alpha}-{\it\beta})|\leqslant 1$ . We introduce
By Dirichlet’s approximation theorem, there exist $a\in \mathbb{Z}$ and $q\in \mathbb{N}$ with $(a,q)=1$ , $1\leqslant q\leqslant X^{2}Q^{-1/2}$ and $|{\it\tau}({\it\alpha}-{\it\beta})-a/q|\leqslant Q^{1/2}(qX^{2})^{-1}$ . Since $|{\it\tau}({\it\alpha}-{\it\beta})|\leqslant 1$ , one has $-q\leqslant a\leqslant q$ . If ${\it\tau}({\it\alpha}-{\it\beta})\not \in {\mathcal{M}}$ , then $q>Q^{1/2}$ . By Vaughan [Reference Vaughan12, Lemma 2.2],
Therefore, we obtain
When ${\it\tau}({\it\alpha}-{\it\beta})\in {\mathcal{M}}$ , we apply the trivial bound to the summation over $x$ to deduce that
The desired conclusion follows from above immediately. ◻
To introduce the next lemma, we define
For $\mathbf{v}=(v_{1},\ldots ,v_{5})\in \mathbb{Z}^{5}$ and $G$ given by (6.1), we write
Lemma 6.3. One has
where
Proof. Let
We set
Then $f$ can be written in the form
where $\mathbf{z}=(z_{1},\ldots ,z_{5})$ , $\mathbf{y}=(y_{1},\ldots ,y_{4})$ , $\mathbf{w}=(w_{1},\ldots ,w_{n-9})$ . Note that $\mathbf{y}^{T}B\mathbf{w}+\mathbf{z}^{T}C\mathbf{w}+p(\mathbf{w})$ vanishes if $n=9$ . Therefore, one has
By Cauchy’s inequality,
where
Then we deduce that
By changing variables $\mathbf{z}_{1}=\mathbf{z}_{2}+\mathbf{v}$ , we have
We exchange the summation over $\mathbf{z}$ and the summation over $\mathbf{v}$ to obtain
where
and
The range of $z_{j}$ in summation (6.7) depends on $v_{j}$ . We first follow the standard argument (see for example the argument around (15) in [Reference Wooley15]) to remove the dependence on $v_{j}$ . We write
and
Then we deduce from (6.7)–(6.9) that
On substituting (6.10) into (6.6), we obtain
Then we conclude that
By putting (6.11) into (6.5), one has
Therefore,
The proof is completed. ◻
Lemma 6.4. Let $J_{{\it\gamma}}({\it\alpha})$ be defined in (6.4). Then one has uniformly for ${\it\gamma}\in [0,1]$ that
Proof. We deduce by changing variables $\mathbf{h}=2G\mathbf{v}$ that
for some constants $c,b_{1},\ldots ,b_{5}$ depending only on $G$ . We point out that $b_{1},\ldots ,b_{5}$ are rational numbers, and we extend the domain of function ${\rm\Lambda}(x)$ by taking ${\rm\Lambda}(x)=0$ if $x\in \mathbb{Q}\setminus \mathbb{N}$ . Then we have
We first handle the easier case $b_{5}=0$ . In this case, we can easily obtain a nontrivial estimate for the summation over $h$ . By Cauchy’s inequality and Lemma 4.1, one has
For ${\it\alpha}\in \mathfrak{m}(Q)$ , we apply Lemma 4.2 to deduce from above
Then for ${\it\alpha}\in \mathfrak{m}(Q)$ , we obtain
and thereby
provided that $b_{5}=0$ . From now on, we assume $b_{5}\not =0$ . Then we have
for some constant $c^{\prime }$ depending only on $b_{1},\ldots ,b_{5}$ and $c$ . Therefore, one has
We apply Cauchy’s inequality to deduce that
We apply Cauchy’s inequality again to obtain
where ${\rm\Xi}_{{\it\gamma}}({\it\alpha})$ is defined as
By Lemma 4.2,
Therefore, we have
Now it suffices to estimate $\int _{\mathfrak{m}(Q)}{\rm\Xi}_{{\it\gamma}}({\it\alpha})\,d{\it\alpha}$ . We observe
where
and
We exchange the order of summation and integration to conclude that
Then the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality implies
Now we apply the method developed by the author [Reference Zhao16] to deduce that
where $\mathbf{u}_{1}=(u_{1},\ldots ,u_{4})^{T}\in \mathbb{Z}^{4}$ and $\mathbf{u}_{2}=(u_{1}^{\prime },\ldots ,u_{4}^{\prime })^{T}\in \mathbb{Z}^{4}$ . Therefore, we obtain by Lemma 4.2
Then we conclude from Lemma 6.2 that
By substituting (6.16) into (6.13), we obtain
provided that $b_{5}\not =0$ .
We complete the proof in view of the argument around (6.12) and (6.17).◻
Lemma 6.5. One has
Proof. By Cauchy’s inequality,
It follows from Lemmas 6.3–6.4 that
We finish Section 6 by pointing out that Proposition 6.1 follows from Lemma 6.5 by the dyadic argument.
7 The Proof of Theorem 1.1
By orthogonality, we have
Recalling the definitions of $\mathfrak{M}$ and $\mathfrak{m}$ in (2.8) and (2.9), we have
In light of Lemma 3.6, to establish the asymptotic formula (1.3), it suffices to prove
In view of Proposition 6.1 and the work of Liu [Reference Liu9] (see also Remark of Lemma 4.4), the estimate (7.2) holds if there exists an invertible matrix
with
Next we assume $\text{rank}(B)\leqslant 4$ for all $B=(a_{i_{k},j_{l}})_{1\leqslant k,l\leqslant 5}$ satisfying $|\{i_{1},\ldots ,i_{5}\}\cap \{j_{1},\ldots ,j_{5}\}|\leqslant 1$ . This yields $\text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)\leqslant 4$ . By Proposition 5.1, we can establish (7.2) again if $\text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)\leqslant 3$ . It remains to consider the case $\text{rank}_{\text{off}}(A)=4$ . Without loss of generality, we assume that $\text{rank}(C)=4$ , where
Let ${\it\gamma}_{j}=(a_{j,5},\ldots ,a_{j,n})^{T}\in \mathbb{Z}^{n-4}$ for $1\leqslant j\leqslant n$ . Then ${\it\gamma}_{1}$ , ${\it\gamma}_{2}$ , ${\it\gamma}_{3}$ and ${\it\gamma}_{4}$ are linear independent due to $\text{rank}(C)=4$ . For $5\leqslant k\leqslant n$ , we consider
According to our assumption, one has $\text{rank}(B)\leqslant 4$ . Then we conclude from above that ${\it\gamma}_{k}$ can be linear represented by ${\it\gamma}_{1}$ , ${\it\gamma}_{2}$ , ${\it\gamma}_{3}$ and ${\it\gamma}_{4}$ . Therefore, one has $\text{rank}(H)=4$ , where
We obtain $\text{rank}(A)\leqslant \text{rank}(H)+4\leqslant 8$ . This is contradictory to the condition that $\text{rank}(A)\geqslant 9$ . Therefore, we complete the proof of Theorem 1.1.