Sums of primes and squares of primes in short intervals (Q833317)

This paper is concerned with Waring-Goldbach problems in additive prime number theory. The authors obtain results on the exceptional set of integers representable as sum of prime powers. More precisely, let us denote \[ \begin{aligned} \mathcal{H}_2(X)&=\{n\in[1,X]: \;2|n, \;n\not\equiv 1\pmod{3}\},\\ \mathcal{H}_3(X)&=\{n\in[1,X]: \;n\equiv 3 \pmod{24}, \;n\not\equiv 0 \pmod{5}\}, \\ \mathcal{H}_4(X)&=\{n\in[1,X]: \;n\equiv 4 \pmod{24}\}. \end{aligned} \] Define \[ E_2(X)=\mathcal{H}_2(X)\setminus\{n: \;n \neq p_1+p_2^2 \text{ for some primes } p_1,p_2\}, \] \[ E_3(X)=\mathcal{H}_3(X)\setminus\{n: \;n \neq p_1^2+p_2^2+p_3^2 \text{ for some primes } p_1,p_2,p_3\} \] and \[ E_3(X)=\mathcal{H}_4(X)\setminus\{n: \;n \neq p_1^2+p_2^2+p_3^2+p_4^2 \text{ for some primes } p_1,p_2,p_3,p_4\}. \] It is shown that for any fixed number \(A>0\), \[ E_j(X+H)-E_j(X)\ll H (\log X)^{-A} \] holds for \(X^{\Delta_j}\leq H\leq X\) (\(j=2,3,4\)), where \[ \Delta_2= 0.33,\quad \Delta_3= 0.35, \quad \Delta_4= 0.27. \] The proofs make use of the circle method, bounds on exponential sums and techniques in sieve theory.