Skolem’s conjecture confirmed for a family of exponential equations, II

Abstract

According to Skolem's conjecture, if an exponential Diophantine equation is not solvable, then it is not solvable modulo an appropriately chosen modulus. Besides several concrete equations, the conjecture has only been proved for rather special cases. In this paper we prove the conjecture for equations of the form x n − by k1 1 . . . y k ℓ ℓ = ±1, where b, x, y 1 , . . . , y ℓ are fixed integers and n, k 1 , . . . , k ℓ are non-negative integral unknowns. This result extends a recent theorem of Hajdu and Tijdeman.