The distribution of sums and products of additive functions (Q2199674)

The celebrated Erdős-Kac theorem says that the values of an additive function satisfying certain mild hypothesis are uniformly distributed. More formally, if \(g\) is strongly additive, \(|g(p)|\le 1\) for all primes \(p\), defining \[ A_g(x):=\sum_{p\le x}\frac{g(p)}{p}\quad {\text{and}}\quad B_g(x):=\left(\sum_{p\le x} \frac{g^2(p)}{p}\left(1-\frac{1}{p}\right)\right)^{1/2}, \] and assuming that \(B_g(x)\) is unbounded, then one has that \[ \lim_{x\to \infty} \frac{1}{x}\#\{n\le x: g(n)<A_g(x)+uB_g(x)\}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}} \int_{-\infty}^u e^{-t^2/2} dt. \] Let us say that \(g\) satisfies an Erdős-Kac law with mean \(A_g\) and variance \(B_g^2 \) if the above limit is satisfied for \(g\). The main result of the paper is that if \(Q(T_1,\ldots,T_\ell)\) is a polynomial with nonnegative real coefficients and \(g_1,\ldots,g_{\ell}\) are nonnegative strongly additive functions such that \begin{itemize} \item[(i)] \(g_j(p)\ll_j 1\) for all primes \(p\), \item[(ii)] for each \(j\in \{1,\ldots,\ell\}\) the series \(\sum_p g_j^2(p)/p\) diverges, \end{itemize} defining \[ \mu(g_j):=\sum_{p\le x}\frac{g_j(p)}{p},\quad \kappa(p_i,p_j):=\sum_{p\le x} \frac{g_i(p)g_j(p)}{p}\left(1-\frac{1}{p}\right),\quad \sigma^2(g_i):=\kappa(g_i,g_i), \] and assuming \(\sigma^2(g_i)\gg \mu(g_j)\) for all sufficiently large \(x\) and all \(1\le i,j\le \ell\), then \(Q(g_1,\ldots,g_\ell)\) satisfies an Erdős-Kac law with mean \(A(\mu(g_1),\ldots,\mu(g_\ell))\) and variance given explicitly in terms of the partial derivatives of \(Q\) and the quantities \(\kappa(g_i,g_j)\) for \(1\le i,j,\le \ell\). As the authors remark, the unnatural condition on the relative sizes of \(\sigma^2(g_i)\) versus \(\mu(g_j)\) is necessary for the proof in its generality but one can get away without these conditions in specific situations. They also show that under the same hypotheses, the same conclusion holds if \(n\) is allowed to vary only in the set of shifted primes, that is the set of numbers of the form \(p-a\) where \(p\) runs through primes and \(a\) is a fixed nonzero integer. The proof uses sieve methods and the Bombieri-Vinogradov theorem.