Prime avoidance property of \(k\)-th powers of prime numbers with Beatty sequence (Q2232042)

This paper is concerned with the existence of infinitely many ``prime avoiding'' \(k\)-th powers of prime numbers of a special type: prime numbers from non-homogeneous Beatty sequences. Recall that for any real \(\alpha, \beta\), the corresponding non-homogeneous Beatty sequence is the sequence of integers defined by \[ \mathcal{B}_{\alpha,\beta}:=\left(\lfloor\alpha n+\beta \rfloor\right)_{n=1}^\infty \] (\(\lfloor x \rfloor\) denotes the greatest integer \(\le x\)). Let \(k\ge 2\) be an integer. Suppose that \(\alpha, \,\beta\) are fixed real numbers with \(\alpha\) being a positive irrational and \textit{of finite type}, that is, \[ \sup\{\rho \in \mathbb{R}\,:\, \liminf_{ n\to \infty}n^\rho \| \alpha n \| =0 \}<\infty \] (\(\|x\|\) denotes the distance from the real number \(x\) to the nearest integer). The authors prove that there exists a constant \(C_0>0\), depending only on \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\), such that for infinitely many \(n\) one has \[ p_{n+1}-p_n\ge C_0 \,\frac{\log m \, \log_2 m \, \log_4 m}{\log_3 m} \] and the interval \([p_n,p_{n+1}]\) contains the \(k\)-th power of a prime \(\tilde{p}\in \mathcal{B}_{\alpha,\beta}\). As usual in the subject, \(\log_2 x=\log\log x\), \(\log_3 x=\log \log \log x\), and so on. To prove the theorem, the authors combine the matrix method of the first named author [Adv. Math. 39, 257--269 (1981; Zbl 0457.10023)] with the method of \textit{K. Ford},\textit{ D. R. Heath-Brown} and \textit{S. Konyagin} [Analytic number theory. In honor of Helmut Maier's 60th birthday. Cham: Springer. 83--92 (2015; Zbl 1391.11125)]. An important tool in the proof is an asymptotic formula (Lemma 3.1) due to \textit{W. D. Banks} and \textit{I. E. Shparlinski} [Colloq. Math. 115, No. 2, 147--157 (2009; Zbl 1167.11010)] for the number of primes \(p=\lfloor \alpha n + \beta \rfloor\) lying in an arithmetic progression. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1473.05003].