On Kummer's conjecture (Q5950941)

In 1850, E. Kummer conjectured that for primes \(p \to \infty\), \[ h_p^{-} \sim G(p) , \] where \(h_p^{-}\) denotes the minus part of the class number of the \(p\)-th cyclotomic field and \(G(p) = 2p(p/4\pi ^2)^{(p-1)/4}\). Assuming the (widely believed) conjectures of Elliott-Halberstam and of Hardy-Littlewood, \textit{A. Granville} [Invent. Math. 100, 321-338 (1990; Zbl 0701.11051)] disproved Kummer's conjecture. In this paper the following ``weak'' form of Kummer's conjecture is proved: there exists some \(c>0\) such that the number of primes \(p \leq x\), for which \[ 1/c \leq \frac{h_p^{-}}{G(p)} \leq c \] holds, is asymptotic to \(x/ \log (x)\) for \(x \to \infty\). Assuming the validity of the Elliott-Halberstam conjecture, it is further shown that for any \(\varepsilon > 0\), \[ 1 - \varepsilon < \frac{h_p^{-}}{G(p)} < 1+ \varepsilon \] holds for all primes \(p\) up to a set of density zero. The proofs combine various estimates from sieve methods and especially the improved version of the Brun-Titchmarsh theorem, as given by \textit{C. Hooley} [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 30, 114-128 (1975; Zbl 0301.10040)].