Almost prime solutions to diophantine systems of high rank

Abstract

Let $\F$ be a family of $r$ integral forms of degree $k\ge 2$ and $\LL=(l_1,\ldots,l_m)$ be a family of pairwise linearly independent linear forms in $n$ variables $\x=(x_1,...,x_n)$. We study the number of solutions $\x\in[1,N]^n$ to the diophantine system $\F(\x)=\vv$ under the restriction that $l_i(\x)$ has a bounded number of prime factors for each $1\le i\le m$. We show that the system $\F$ have the expected number of such "almost prime" solutions under similar conditions as was established for existence of integer solutions by Birch.