Almost cubes and fourth powers in short intervals

Abstract: In this paper, we study how short an interval $[x, x + x^\theta]$ contains an integer of the form $n_1 n_2 n_3$ and $m_1 m_2 m_3 m_4$ with $n_1 \approx n_2 \approx n_3$ and $m_1 \approx m_2 \approx m_3 \approx m_4$. The new idea is to adopt a second moment method (usually used for almost all results) to deduce a result for all short intervals.