Angles of Gaussian primes (Q2317677)

A prime \(p\) can be represented as sum of two squares if and only if \(p\) is congruent to \(1\) modulo \(4\). If \(p \equiv 1\) (mod \(4\)), there are exactly \(8\) representations of \(p\) as sum of two squares. To each representation \(p = a^2 + b^2\), with \(a, b \in \mathbb{Z}\), one can associate the angle \(\theta_{a,b}\) so that \(\tan(\theta_{a,b}) = b/a\). Hecke showed that these angles are uniformly distributed as \(p\) varies. In this article, the authors study the variance of the number of these angles in a short arc. For each representation \(a^2 + b^2\) of the prime \(p\), consider the Gaussian integer \(a + bi\). The authors formulate their results on the statistics of the angles \(\theta_{a,b}\) using prime ideals of the ring of Gaussian integers. In the main theorem, they show under the GRH, that for sufficiently large \(K\) if the interval \([0, \pi/2)\) is divided into \(K\) disjoint arcs of equal length, then almost all arcs contain an angle \(\theta_{\mathfrak{p}}\) for a prime ideal in \(\mathbb{Z}[i]\) with norm bounded above by \(K (\log K)^{2+o(1)}\). This bound is smaller than upper bounds that can be achieved using zero-density estimates without assuming the GRH.