Consider the same problem as above, except now you may assume that the array is sorted. What is the tight theoretical lower bound for the worst case time complexity of any algorithm which solves this problem?

Suppose $a$ and $b$ are two numbers, with $a\le b$. Consider the problem of counting the number of elements in an array which are between $a$ and $b$; that is, the number of elements $x$ such that $a\le x\le b$. You may assume for simplicity that both $a$ and $b$ are in the array, and there are no duplicates.

A rotated sorted array is an array that is the result of taking a sorted array and moving a contiguous section from the front of the array to the back of the array. For example, the array [5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4] is a rotated sorted array: it is the result of taking the sorted array [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and moving the first 4 elements, [1, 2, 3, 4], to the back of the array. Sorted arrays are also rotated sorted arrays, technically speaking, since you can think of a sorted array as the result of taking the sorted array and moving the first 0 elements to the back.

The function below attempts to find the value of the minimum element in a rotated sorted array. It is given the array arr and the indices start and stop which indicate the range of the array that should be searched. One line in the function has been left blank.

import math
def find_minimum_in_rotated_sorted(arr, start, stop):
    """
    Searches arr[start:stop] for the smallest element.
    Assumes arr is a rotated sorted array.
    """
    if stop < start:
        return arr[0]
    if stop == start:
        return arr[start]
    mid = (start + stop) // 2

    if ________________:
        return arr[mid + 1]
    if arr[start] < arr[mid]:
        return find_minimum_in_rotated_sorted(arr, mid, stop)
    else:
        return find_minimum_in_rotated_sorted(arr, start, mid - 1)

What should be filled in the blank line to make this function work correctly?