Double roots of power series and related matters

For a given collection of distinct arguments , multiplicities and a real interval containing zero, we are interested in determining the smallest for which there is a power series with coefficients in , and roots of order respectively. We denote this by . We describe the usual form of the extremal series (we give a sufficient condition which is also necessary when the extremal series possesses at least non-dependent coefficients strictly inside , where is 1 or 2 as is real or complex). We focus particularly on , the size of the smallest double root of a power series lying on a given ray (of interest in connection with the complex analogue of work of Boris Solomyak on the distribution of the random series ). We computed the value of for the rationals in of denominator less than fifty. The smallest value we encountered was . For the one-sided intervals and the corresponding smallest values were and .