Integral Apollonian circle packings and prime curvatures (Q351307)

The author presents density results for the set of curvatures in primitive integral Apollonian circle packings. It is shown that for any such circle packing there exists a number \(c>0\) such that for sufficiently large \(X\), the number of prime numbers less than \(X\) which are curvatures of circles in the packing is at least \(cX/\log X\). The so-called ``positive density'' conjecture says that every primitive integral Apollonian circle packing produces a set of curvatures of positive density in \(\mathbb Z\). The author gives a new, alternative proof of this. He uses the circle method, binary quadratic forms and other interesting tools to get these interesting results. In the corrigendum [ibid. 120, 393 (2013; Zbl 1281.52012)] a modification of the estimate (1.3) is given.