The structure of correlations of multiplicative functions at almost all scales, with applications to the Chowla and Elliott conjectures (Q2278139)

The arithmetic function \(f\) is called ``1-bounded'' if its values all belong to the unit complex disk. In the paper under review the authors study the asymptotic behaviour of higher order correlations \[ \mathbb{E}_{n\leq X/d}\,g_1(n+ah_1)\cdots g_k(n+ah_k) \] as a function of the parameters \(a\) and \(d\), where \(g_1,\dots,g_k\) are 1-bounded multiplicative functions, \(h_1,\dots, h_k\) are integer shifts, and \(X\) is large. Their main result asserts that such correlations asymptotically vanish for almost all \(X\) if \(g_1,\dots,g_k\) does not (weakly) pretend to be a twisted Dirichlet character \(n\mapsto\chi(n)n^{it}\), and behave asymptotically like a multiple of \(d^{-it}\chi(a)\) otherwise. The result has several corollaries including verification of some cases of the unweighted Elliott conjecture at almost all scales, the binary unweighted Elliott conjecture at almost all scales, some cases of the unweighted Chowla conjecture at almost all scales, and Liouville sign patterns of length three. The authors also give some applications of their results to the largest prime factors of consecutive integers at almost all scales, and even order correlations of a twisted Liouville function.