We enhance the efficient congruencing method for estimating Vinogradov’s integral for moments of order 2$s$, with $${1\leqslant s\leqslant k^{2}-1}$$ . In this way, we prove the main conjecture for such even moments when $${1\leqslant s\leqslant \tfrac{1}{4}(k+1)^{2}}$$ , showing that the moments exhibit strongly diagonal behaviour in this range. There are improvements also for larger values of$s$, these finding application to the asymptotic formula in Waring’s problem.

We call a finite set ${\mathcal{D}}\subset {\Bbb Z}^s$ a {\it (self-affine) tile digit set} with respect to an expanding integral matrix ${\bf A}$ if the self-affine set $T({\bf A}, \D)$ is a tile in ${\Bbb R}^s$. It has been a widely open problem to characterize the tile digit sets for a given ${\bf A}$. While there are substantial investigations on ${\Bbb R}$, there is no result on ${\Bbb R}^s$ other than the case where $|\det {\bf A}| =p$ with $p$ a prime. In this paper, we make an initiation to study a basic case ${\bf A} = p{\bf I}_2$ in ${\Bbb R}^2$. We characterize the tile digit sets by making use of the zeros of the mask polynomial of ${\mathcal{D}}$ associated with a tile criterion of Kenyon [K], together with a recent result of Iosevich {\it et al} on factorization of sets in ${\Bbb Z}_p \times {\Bbb Z}_p$ [IMP].

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This paper provides a new construction of a supply of Darmon-like points on elliptic curves E defined over a quadratic extension of totally real number fields.

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