Explicit bounds for rational points near planar curves and metric Diophantine approximation

The primary goal of this paper is to complete the theory of metric Diophantine approximation initially developed in Beresnevich et al. (2007) [10] for C-3 non-degenerate planar curves. With this goal in mind, here for the first time we obtain fully explicit bounds for the number of rational points near planar curves. Further, introducing a perturbational approach we bring the smoothness condition imposed on the curves down to C-1 (lowest possible). This way we broaden the notion of non-degeneracy in a natural direction and introduce a new topologically complete class of planar curves to the theory of Diophantine approximation. In summary, our findings improve and complete the main theorems of Beresnevich et al. (2007) [10] and extend the celebrated theorem of Kleinbock and Margulis (1998) [20] in dimension 2 beyond the notion of non-degeneracy. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.