Integral Points on Elliptic Curves and the Bombieri-Pila Bounds

Abstract

Let C be an affine, plane, algebraic curve of degree d with integer coefficients. In 1989, Bombieri and Pila showed that if one takes a box with sides of length N then C can obtain no more than O_{d,ε}(N^{1/d+ε}) integer points within the box. Importantly, the implied constant makes no reference to the coefficients of the curve. Examples of certain rational curves show that this bound is tight but it has long been thought that when restricted to non-rational curves an improvement should be possible whilst maintaining the uniformity of the bound. In this paper we consider this problem restricted to elliptic curves and show that for a large family of these curves the Bombieri-Pila bounds can be improved. The techniques involved include repulsion of integer points, the theory of heights and the large sieve. As an application we prove a uniform bound for the number of rational points of bounded height on a general del Pezzo surface of degree 1.