Remarks on sums of reciprocals of fractional parts

Abstract: The Diophantine sums $\sum_{n=1}^N | n \alpha |^{-1}$ and $\sum_{n=1}^N n^{-1} | n \alpha |^{-1}$ appear in many different areas including the ergodic theory of circle rotations, lattice point counting and random walks, often in connection with Fourier analytic methods. Beresnevich, Haynes and Velani gave estimates for these and related sums in terms of the Diophantine approximation properties of $\alpha$ that are sharp up to a constant factor. In the present paper, we remove the constant factor gap between the upper and the lower estimates, and thus find the precise asymptotics for a wide class of irrationals. Our methods apply to sums with the fractional part instead of the distance from the nearest integer function, and to sums involving shifts $| n \alpha + \beta |$ as well. We also comment on a higher dimensional generalization of these sums.