A note on Mertens' formula for arithmetic progressions (Q2469209): Difference between revisions

From the text: The authors study the Mertens product over primes in arithmetic progressions, and find a uniform version of previous results. In more detail, let \(\gamma\) denote the Euler constant. The authors prove a generalization to primes belonging to arithmetic progressions of the well-known Mertens' formula \[ \prod_{p\leq x}\left(1-\frac 1p\right)=\frac{e^{-\gamma}}{\log x} +O\left(\frac {1}{\log^2x}\right)\quad \text{as}\;x\to +\infty, \] which is uniform with respect to the modulus. This is a generalization of a result of \textit{K. S. Williams} [J. Number Theory 6, 353--359 (1974; Zbl 0286.10022)] dealing with a fixed arithmetic progression. Let \(q\geq 1\) and \(a\) be integers with \((a,q)=1\), and define \[ P(x;q,a)=\prod_{{p\leq x}\atop{p\equiv a\bmod q}}\left(1-\frac 1p\right) \tag{1} \] and \[ M(x;q,a)=\frac{C(q,a)}{(\log x)^{1/\varphi(q)}}, \] where \(\varphi\) denotes Euler's function and \(C(q,a)\) is real and positive and satisfies \[ C(q,a)^{\varphi(q)}=e^{-\gamma}\prod_p\left(1-\frac 1p\right)^{\alpha(p;q,a)}, \] where \(\alpha(p;q,a)=\varphi(q)-1\) if \(p\equiv a\bmod q\) and \(\alpha(p;q,a)=-1\) otherwise. The authors prove an asymptotic formula for the product in (1) of the form \[ P(x;q,a)=M(x;q,a)(1+O(\text{error term})) \] where both the size of the error term and the range of uniformity for \(q\) depend on the existence of the exceptional zero (Siegel zero) for a suitable set of Dirichlet \(L\)-functions.