English

Counting $2\times 2$ matrices with fixed determinant and bounded coefficients

Number Theory 2026-04-01 v1

Abstract

Recent work by M. Afifurrahman established the first asymptotic estimates with error terms for the number of 2×22\times 2 matrices with fixed non-zero determinant nNn\in\mathbb{N}, and with coefficients bounded in absolute value by XX. In this paper we present a new proof of this result, which also gives an improved error term as XX\rightarrow\infty. Similar to Afifurrahman's result, our error term is uniform in both nn and XX, and our estimates are significant for XX as small as n1/2+δn^{1/2+\delta}. To complement this, we also demonstrate that the exponent 1/2+δ1/2+\delta in this statement cannot be reduced, by establishing a result which gives a different asymptotic main term when nn is either a prime or the square of a prime, and when X=n1/2X=n^{1/2}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.16890,
  title  = {Counting $2\times 2$ matrices with fixed determinant and bounded coefficients},
  author = {Kavita Dhanda and Alan Haynes and Silmi Prasala},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.16890},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

7 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:47:54.676Z