Prime divisors in Beatty sequences (Q2370192)

For two fixed real numbers \(\alpha>0\) and \(\beta\), the corresponding \textit{Beatty sequence} is the sequence of integers of general term \(\lfloor \alpha n+\beta\rfloor\), \(n=0,1,\ldots\). In this paper, the authors prove that the arithmetic properties of these numbers resemble the arithmetic properties of numbers of the form \(an+b\) where \(a\) and \(b\) are fixed integers. For example, with \(\omega(m)\) and \(\Omega(m)\) being the number of distinct prime factors of \(m\) and the total number of prime factors of \(m\), respectively, one has \[ \sum_{n\leq N} \omega(\lfloor \alpha n+\beta\rfloor )\sim N\log\log N\quad \text{and}\qquad \sum_{n\leq N} (-1)^{\Omega(\lfloor \alpha n+\beta\rfloor)}=o(N) \] as \(N\to\infty\). The maximal order of the number of distinct prime factors function of a number of the type \(\lfloor \alpha n+\beta\rfloor\) for \(n\leq N\) is \((1+o(1))(\log N)/(\log\log N)\) as \(N\to\infty\), and also there are numbers \(n\leq N\) such that the largest prime factor of \(\lfloor \alpha n+\beta\rfloor\) is of order \(N\). Finally, the number of \(Q\)-smooth numbers among the numbers of the shape \(\lfloor \alpha n+\beta\rfloor\) for \(n\leq N\) is, as expected, asymptotically equal to \((1+o(1))\rho(u)N\) as \(N\to\infty\), where as usual \(u=(\log N)/(\log Q)\) provided that \(\exp((\log N)^{2/3+\varepsilon})<Q\leq N\). There is also a result showing that the sum of the binary digits of \(\lfloor \alpha n+\beta\rfloor\) is uniformly distributed modulo \(2\) when \(n\leq N\) and \(N\) is large. The proofs rely heavily on a series of results from some papers of Sárközy and co-authors (Erdős, Maier, Pomerance, Stewart) concerning arithmetic functions of numbers of the form \(a+b\), with \(a\in {\mathcal A}\) and \(b\in {\mathcal B}\), where \({\mathcal A}\) and \({\mathcal B}\) are subsets of \([1,M]\) with the property that the product of their cardinalities is large.