Heights and transcendence of $p$--adic continued fractions

Abstract: Special kinds of continued fractions have been proved to converge to transcendental real numbers by means of the celebrated Subspace Theorem. In this paper we study the analogous $p$--adic problem. More specifically, we deal with Browkin $p$--adic continued fractions. First we give some new remarks about the Browkin algorithm in terms of a $p$--adic Euclidean algorithm. Then, we focus on the heights of some $p$--adic numbers having a periodic $p$--adic continued fraction expansion and we obtain some upper bounds. Finally, we exploit these results, together with $p$--adic Roth-like results, in order to prove the transcendence of two families of $p$--adic continued fractions.