Successive Minima and Best Simultaneous Diophantine Approximations

We study the problem of best approximations of a vector $\alpha\in{\mathbb R}^n$ by rational vectors of a lattice $\Lambda\subset {\mathbb R}^n$ whose common denominator is bounded. To this end we introduce successive minima for a periodic lattice structure and extend some classical results from geometry of numbers to this structure. This leads to bounds for the best approximation problem which generalize and improve former results.