Systems of Diagonal Equations Over p-Adic Fields

Let K be a p-adic field, and consider the system F = (F₁,...,F_R)of diagonal equations (1) with coefficients in K. It is an interesting problem in numbertheory to determine when such a system possesses a nontrivialK-rational solution. In particular, we define *(k, R, K) tobe the smallest natural number such that any system of R equationsof degree k in N variables with coefficients in K has a nontrivialK-rational solution provided only that N*(k, R, K). For example,when k = 1, ordinary linear algebra tells us that *(1, R, K)= R + 1 for any field K. We also define *(k, R) to be the smallestinteger N such that *(k, R, Q_p) N for all primes p.