The abc conjecture implies infinitely many non-Wieferich places for fixed bases in number fields

Abstract

Silverman showed that, assuming the $abc$ conjecture, there are $\gg \log x$ non-Wieferich primes base $a$ less than $x$ \cite{silverman}, for all non-zero $a$. This inspired Graves and Murty \cite{Graves}, Chen and Ding \cite{Chen1} \cite{Chen2}, and then Ding \cite{Ding} to find growth results, assuming the $abc$ conjecture, for non-Wieferich primes $p$ base $a$, where $p \equiv 1 \pmod{k}$ for integers $k \geq 2$. In light of Murty, Srinivas, and Subramani's recent work on `the Wieferich primes conjecture' and Euclidean algorithms in number fields \cite{murty}, number theorists need results on non-Wieferich places in number fields. We prove analogues of the results of Graves \& Murty and Ding, and show Ding's result holds for all bases $a$ in all imaginary quadratic fields' rings of integers, with $31$ explicitly listed exceptions. Along the way, we generalize useful results on rational integers to algebraic integers.