ARITHMETICAL RESULTS ON CERTAIN q-SERIES, I

Abstract

Entire transcendental solutions of certain mth order linear q-difference equations with polynomial coefficients are considered. The aim of this paper is to give, under appropriate arithmetical conditions, lower bounds for the dimension of the K-vector space generated by 1 and the values of these solutions at m successive powers of q, where K is the rational or an imaginary quadratic number field. The main ingredients of the proofs are, first, Nesterenko's dimension estimate and its various generalizations, and secondly, Popov's method (in Töpfer's version) for the asymptotic evaluation of certain complex integrals.