We have nth roots that can be rewritten as fractional powers:
$\sqrt[n] x = x^\frac 1 n$
I was looking around on Wikipedia and some other online material, but I couldn't find any definitive set of numbers that the index, $n$, belongs to.
Wikipedia says this in its nth root article:
The nth root of a number x, where n is a positive integer...
It then goes on to include this a few lines down:
For the extension of powers and roots to indices that are not positive integers, see exponentiation.
So one part states that $n$ must be positive integral, but another leads toward non-positive integral. However, I couldn't really pull anything from the Exponentiation article that was referenced.
Is it permitted for the index to be fractional, such that:
$\sqrt[\frac 1 n] x = x^n$