On some Diophantine systems involving symmetric polynomials

TL;DR

This paper extends previous results on Diophantine systems involving elementary symmetric polynomials, proving the existence of infinitely many solutions for certain systems with rational parameters and exploring more general cases.

Contribution

It generalizes and extends prior work by Zhang and Cai, establishing the existence of infinitely many solutions for specific symmetric polynomial systems with rational parameters.

Findings

Infinitely many solutions depend on n-3 free parameters for certain systems.

Results hold for systems involving elementary symmetric polynomials with rational coefficients.

Additional insights into systems with three different symmetric polynomials are provided.

Abstract

Let $\sigma_{i}(x_{1},\ldots, x_{n})=\sum_{1\leq k_{1}<k_{2}<\ldots <k_{i}\leq n}x_{k_{1}}\ldots x_{k_{i}}$ be the $i$-th elementary symmetric polynomial. In this note we generalize and extend the results obtained in a recent work of Zhang and Cai \cite{ZC,ZC2}. More precisely, we prove that for each $n\geq 4$ and rational numbers $a, b$ with $ab\neq 0$, the system of diophantine equations \begin{equation*} \sigma_{1}(x_{1},\ldots, x_{n})=a, \quad \sigma_{n}(x_{1},\ldots, x_{n})=b, \end{equation*} has infinitely many solutions depending on $n-3$ free parameters. A similar result is proved for the system \begin{equation*} \sigma_{i}(x_{1},\ldots, x_{n})=a, \quad \sigma_{n}(x_{1},\ldots, x_{n})=b, \end{equation*} with $n\geq 4$ and $2\leq i< n$. Here, $a, b$ are rational numbers with $b\neq 0$. We also give some results concerning the general system of the form \begin{equation*} \sigma_{i}(x_{1},\ldots, x_{n})=a, \quad \sigma_{j}(x_{1},\ldots, x_{n})=b, \end{equation*} with suitably chosen rational values of $a, b$ and $i<j<n$. Finally, we present some remarks on the systems involving three different symmetric polynomials.