Local-global principles for visibility of lattice points on parameterized curves

Abstract

We develop a local-global theory for visibility of lattice points on families of parameterized curves. We introduce a notion of $p$-adic visibility and ask whether a lattice point is globally visible precisely when it is visible at every prime. We prove that this local-global principle holds for a broad class of families whose parametrizations are homogeneous with respect to positive weights. When the points on these curves fill the entire positive integer lattice, we compute the local and global densities of visible points and show that the global density is the product of the local densities. We then consider polynomial families of the form $y=qP(x)$, with $q\in\mathbb{Q}_{>0}$, and show that visibility can be detected prime by prime exactly when $P$ is a monomial. For non-monomial polynomials the local-global principle can fail, but the set of points where it fails has density zero; for separable polynomials we also obtain a quantitative bound for the number of non-visible points, improving the previously known bound. We further consider families whose lattice points lie on a proper lower-dimensional algebraic subset of the ambient space and show that their visibility densities can behave differently from those of the full lattice. Finally, we extend the theory from visibility from the origin to visibility from one lattice point to another and show that the corresponding local-global principle continues to hold for weighted homogeneous families.