Intersections of binary quadratic forms in primes and the paucity phenomenon

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Abstract: The number of solutions to a2+b2=c2+d2lex in integers is a well-known result, while if one restricts all the variables to primes Erdos showed that only the diagonal solutions, namely, the ones with a,b=c,d contribute to the main term, hence there is a paucity of the off-diagonal solutions. Daniel considered the case of a,c being prime and proved that the main term has both the diagonal and the non-diagonal contributions. Here we investigate the remaining cases, namely when only c is a prime and when both c,d are primes and, finally, when b,c,d are primes by combining techniques of Daniel, Hooley and Plaksin.


In this present work the author investigates positive solutions to \(a^{2}+b^{2}=c^{2}+d^{2}\) when \textit{some} of \(a, b, c, d\) are primes, particularly, when only \(c\) is a prime; when both \(c, d\) are primes and, finally, \(b, c, d\) are primes. The results obtained confirm that there is no paucity of the non-diagonal solutions in the first two cases. Denote by \(\mathbb{P}\) the set of all prime numbers, where the letters \(p, q, r\) represent elements of \(\mathbb{P}\). For natural number \(n\in \mathbb{N}\) define the following functions \(r_{0}(n)=\#\{(a,b)\in \mathbb{N}^{2}:n=a^{2}+b^{2}\},\) \(r_{1}(n)=\#\{(a,p)\in \mathbb{N}\times \mathbb{P}:n=a^{2}+p^{2}\},\) \(r_{2}(n)=\#\{(p,q)\in \mathbb{P}^{2}:n=p^{2}+q^{2}\},\) so that for \(i, j\in\{0,1,2\}\) the mean values can be obtained via the function \(S_{i,j}(x)=\displaystyle \sum_{n\leq x}r_{i}(n)r_{j}(n)\). Here the asymptotic formulas for \(S_{i,j}(x)\) can be interpreted in terms of the number of solutions to \(a^{2}+b^{2}=c^{2}+d^{2}\), where some of \(a, b, c, d\in \mathbb{N}\) are restricted to primes, depending on the values \(i, j.\) In the present work the author considers \(S_{i,j}(x)\) with \(i\neq j;i, j\in\{0,1,2\}\), with the main results stated below. Theorem 1. As \( x\rightarrow\infty\) we have that \(S_{0,1}(x)=\displaystyle \sum_{n\leq x}r_{0}(n)r_{1}(n)=\frac{x}{2}+O\left (\frac{x\log\log x}{\log x}\right)\) . Corollary 1. For any \(c>0\) the dispersion satisfies \(\displaystyle \sum_{n\leq x}\left(r_{1}(n)-\frac{cr_{0}(n)}{\log n}\right)^{2}\asymp\frac{x}{\log x}.\) Theorem 2. As \( x\rightarrow\infty\) we have \(S_{0,2}(x)=\displaystyle \sum_{n\leq x}r_{0}(n)r_{2}(n)=\frac{12G}{\pi^{2}}\frac{x}{\log x}+O\left(\frac{x\log\log x}{\log^{2}x}\right)\) , where \(G\) is the Catalan constant given by \( G=L(2,\displaystyle \chi_{4})=\sum_{k=0}^{\infty}\frac{(-1)^{k}}{(2k+1)^{2}}=0.915\ldots\) Theorem 3. As \( x\rightarrow\infty\) we have that \(\displaystyle \frac{2\pi x}{\log^{2}x}\) << \(S_{1,2}(x)=\displaystyle \sum_{n\leq x}r_{1}(n)r_{2}(n)\) << \(\displaystyle \frac{x}{\log^{2}x}(\log\log x)^{2}\).











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