On the Hardy-Littlewood prime tuples conjecture and higher convolutions of Ramanujan sums (Q6187377)

In the paper under review, the authors generalize the method of \textit{H. G. Gadiyar} and \textit{R. Padma} [Physica A. 269, 503--510 (1999)], which is based on a simple orthogonality principle for Ramanujan sums originally discovered by \textit{R. D. Carmichael} [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (2) 34, 1--26 (1932; Zbl 0004.29305)], to derive a heuristic formulation of the general Hardy-Littlewood \(k\)-tuple conjecture. For, they first review the orthogonality principle for Ramanujan sums for ``double convolutions'' and explain how to generalize it to ``triple convolutions'' and even further. Then, they give a heuristic derivation of the Hardy-Littlewood \(3\)-tuple conjecture. The authors give an estimate to the triple convolution of the Jordan totient function \(\varphi_\alpha(n)\), and as corollary, they approximate the sum \(\sum_{n\leq x}\varphi_\alpha(n)\varphi_\alpha(n+h_1)\varphi_\alpha(n+h_2)\) for given positive integers \(h_1, h_2\).