Most odd-degree binary forms fail to primitively represent a square

Abstract

Let $F$ be a separable integral binary form of odd degree $N \geq 5$ . A result of Darmon and Granville known as ‘Faltings plus epsilon’ implies that the degree- $N$ superelliptic equation $y^2 = F(x,z)$ has finitely many primitive integer solutions. In this paper, we consider the family $\mathscr {F}_N(f_0)$ of degree- $N$ superelliptic equations with fixed leading coefficient $f_0 \in \mathbb {Z} \smallsetminus \pm \mathbb {Z}^2$ , ordered by height. For every sufficiently large $N$ , we prove that among equations in the family $\mathscr {F}_N(f_0)$ , more than $74.9\,\%$ are insoluble, and more than $71.8\,\%$ are everywhere locally soluble but fail the Hasse principle due to the Brauer–Manin obstruction. We further show that these proportions rise to at least $99.9\,\%$ and $96.7\,\%$ , respectively, when $f_0$ has sufficiently many prime divisors of odd multiplicity. Our result can be viewed as a strong asymptotic form of ‘Faltings plus epsilon’ for superelliptic equations and constitutes an analogue of Bhargava's result that most hyperelliptic curves over $\mathbb {Q}$ have no rational points.