In this paper we investigate the quantity of diagonal quartic surfaces $a_0 X_0^4 + a_1 X_1^4 + a_2 X_2^4 +a_3 X_3^4 = 0$ which have a Brauer–Manin obstruction to the Hasse principle. We are able to find an asymptotic formula for the quantity of such surfaces ordered by height. The proof uses a generalization of a method of Heath-Brown on sums over linked variables. We also show that there exists no uniform formula for a generic generator in this family.

Fujii obtained a formula for the average number of Goldbach representations with lower-order terms expressed as a sum over the zeros of the Riemann zeta function and a smaller error term. This assumed the Riemann Hypothesis. We obtain an unconditional version of this result and obtain applications conditional on various conjectures on zeros of the Riemann zeta function.

We prove some zero density theorems for certain families of Dirichlet L-functions. More specifically, the subjects of our interest are the collections of Dirichlet L-functions associated with characters to moduli from certain sparse sets and of certain fixed orders.

We investigate the large values of the derivatives of the Riemann zeta function $\zeta (s)$ on the 1-line. We give a larger lower bound for $\max _{t\in [T,2T]}|\zeta ^{(\ell )}(1+{i} t)|$ , which improves the previous result established by Yang [‘Extreme values of derivatives of the Riemann zeta function’, Mathematika 68 (2022), 486–510].

We study the asymptotic behavior of the sequence $ \{\Omega (n) \}_{ n \in \mathbb {N} } $ from a dynamical point of view, where $ \Omega (n) $ denotes the number of prime factors of $ n $ counted with multiplicity. First, we show that for any non-atomic ergodic system $(X, \mathcal {B}, \mu , T)$, the operators $T^{\Omega (n)}: \mathcal {B} \to L^1(\mu )$ have the strong sweeping-out property. In particular, this implies that the pointwise ergodic theorem does not hold along $\Omega (n)$. Second, we show that the behaviors of $\Omega (n)$ captured by the prime number theorem and Erdős–Kac theorem are disjoint, in the sense that their dynamical correlations tend to zero.

For a positive integer $r\geq 2$, a natural number n is r-free if there is no prime p such that $p^r\mid n$. Asymptotic formulae for the distribution of r-free integers in the floor function set $S(x):=\{\lfloor x/ n \rfloor :1\leq n\leq x\}$ are derived. The first formula uses an estimate for elements of $S(x)$ belonging to arithmetic progressions. The other, more refined, formula makes use of an exponent pair and the Riemann hypothesis.

Let $[t]$ be the integral part of the real number t and let $\mathbb {1}_{{\mathbb P}}$ be the characteristic function of the primes. Denote by $\pi _{\mathcal {S}}(x)$ the number of primes in the floor function set $\mathcal {S}(x) := \{[{x}/{n}] : 1\leqslant n\leqslant x\}$ and by $S_{\mathbb {1}_{{\mathbb P}}}(x)$ the number of primes in the sequence $\{[{x}/{n}]\}_{n\geqslant 1}$ . Improving a result of Heyman [‘Primes in floor function sets’, Integers22 (2022), Article no. A59], we show

$$ \begin{align*} \pi_{\mathcal{S}}(x) = \int_2^{\sqrt{x}} \frac{d t}{\log t} + \int_2^{\sqrt{x}} \frac{d t}{\log(x/t)} + O(\sqrt{x}\,\mathrm{e}^{-c(\log x)^{3/5}(\log\log x)^{-1/5}}) \quad\mbox{and}\quad S_{\mathbb{1}_{{\mathbb P}}}(x) = C_{\mathbb{1}_{{\mathbb P}}} x + O_{\varepsilon}(x^{9/19+\varepsilon}) \end{align*} $$

for $x\to \infty $ , where $C_{\mathbb {1}_{{\mathbb P}}} := \sum _{p} {1}/{p(p+1)}$ , $c>0$ is a positive constant and $\varepsilon $ is an arbitrarily small positive number.

For a fixed integer h, the standard orthogonality relations for Ramanujan sums $c_r(n)$ give an asymptotic formula for the shifted convolution $\sum _{n\le N} c_q(n)c_r(n+h)$ . We prove a generalised formula for affine convolutions $\sum _{n\le N} c_q(n)c_r(kn+h)$ . This allows us to study affine convolutions $\sum _{n\le N} f(n)g(kn+h)$ of arithmetical functions $f,g$ admitting a suitable Ramanujan–Fourier expansion. As an application, we give a heuristic justification of the Hardy–Littlewood conjectural asymptotic formula for counting Sophie Germain primes.

Let $\omega ^*(n)$ be the number of primes p such that $p-1$ divides n. Recently, M. R. Murty and V. K. Murty proved that

$$ \begin{align*}x(\log\log x)^3\ll\sum_{n\le x}\omega^*(n)^2\ll x\log x.\end{align*} $$

They further conjectured that there is some positive constant C such that

$$ \begin{align*}\sum_{n\le x}\omega^*(n)^2\sim Cx\log x,\end{align*} $$

as $x\rightarrow \infty $ . In this short note, we give the correct order of the sum by showing that

$$ \begin{align*}\sum_{n\le x}\omega^*(n)^2\asymp x\log x.\end{align*} $$

We investigate the leading digit distribution of the kth largest prime factor of n (for each fixed $k=1,2,3,\dots $) as well as the sum of all prime factors of n. In each case, we find that the leading digits are distributed according to Benford’s law. Moreover, Benford behavior emerges simultaneously with equidistribution in arithmetic progressions uniformly to small moduli.

We consider two sequences $a(n)$ and $b(n)$, $1\leq n<\infty $, generated by Dirichlet series

$$ \begin{align*}\sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{a(n)}{\lambda_n^{s}}\qquad\text{and}\qquad \sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{b(n)}{\mu_n^{s}},\end{align*} $$

satisfying a familiar functional equation involving the gamma function $\Gamma (s)$. Two general identities are established. The first involves the modified Bessel function $K_{\mu }(z)$, and can be thought of as a ‘modular’ or ‘theta’ relation wherein modified Bessel functions, instead of exponential functions, appear. Appearing in the second identity are $K_{\mu }(z)$, the Bessel functions of imaginary argument $I_{\mu }(z)$, and ordinary hypergeometric functions ${_2F_1}(a,b;c;z)$. Although certain special cases appear in the literature, the general identities are new. The arithmetical functions appearing in the identities include Ramanujan’s arithmetical function $\tau (n)$, the number of representations of n as a sum of k squares $r_k(n)$, and primitive Dirichlet characters $\chi (n)$.

Let $\mathcal {A}$ be the set of all integers of the form $\gcd (n, F_n)$ , where n is a positive integer and $F_n$ denotes the nth Fibonacci number. Leonetti and Sanna proved that $\mathcal {A}$ has natural density equal to zero, and asked for a more precise upper bound. We prove that

$$ \begin{align*} \#\big(\mathcal{A} \cap [1, x]\big) \ll \frac{x \log \log \log x}{\log \log x} \end{align*} $$

Let $\mathbb {T}$ be the unit circle and ${\Gamma \backslash G}$ the $3$-dimensional Heisenberg nilmanifold. We consider the skew products on $\mathbb {T} \times {\Gamma \backslash G}$ and prove that the Möbius function is linearly disjoint from these skew products which improves the recent result of Huang, Liu and Wang [‘Möbius disjointness for skew products on a circle and a nilmanifold’, Discrete Contin. Dyn. Syst.41(8) (2021), 3531–3553].

We investigate uniform upper bounds for the number of powerful numbers in short intervals $(x, x + y]$ . We obtain unconditional upper bounds $O({y}/{\log y})$ and $O(\kern1.3pt y^{11/12})$ for all powerful numbers and $y^{1/2}$ -smooth powerful numbers, respectively. Conditional on the $abc$ -conjecture, we prove the bound $O({y}/{\log ^{1+\epsilon } y})$ for squarefull numbers and the bound $O(\kern1.3pt y^{(2 + \epsilon )/k})$ for k-full numbers when $k \ge 3$ . These bounds are related to Roth’s theorem on arithmetic progressions and the conjecture on the nonexistence of three consecutive squarefull numbers.

Given a large integer n, determining the relative size of each of its prime divisors as well as the spacings between these prime divisors has been the focus of several studies. Here, we examine the spacings between particular types of prime divisors of n, such as prime divisors in certain congruence classes of primes and various other subsets of the set of prime numbers.

Sarnak’s Möbius disjointness conjecture asserts that for any zero entropy dynamical system $(X,T)$ , $({1}/{N})\! \sum _{n=1}^{N}\! f(T^{n} x) \mu (n)= o(1)$ for every $f\in \mathcal {C}(X)$ and every $x\in X$ . We construct examples showing that this $o(1)$ can go to zero arbitrarily slowly. In fact, our methods yield a more general result, where in lieu of $\mu (n)$ , one can put any bounded sequence $a_{n}$ such that the Cesàro mean of the corresponding sequence of absolute values does not tend to zero. Moreover, in our construction, the choice of x depends on the sequence $a_{n}$ but $(X,T)$ does not.

We establish the optimal order of Malliavin-type remainders in the asymptotic density approximation formula for Beurling generalized integers. Given $\alpha \in (0,1]$ and $c>0$ (with $c\leq 1$ if $\alpha =1$ ), a generalized number system is constructed with Riemann prime counting function $ \Pi (x)= \operatorname {\mathrm {Li}}(x)+ O(x\exp (-c \log ^{\alpha } x ) +\log _{2}x), $ and whose integer counting function satisfies the extremal oscillation estimate $N(x)=\rho x + \Omega _{\pm }(x\exp (- c'(\log x\log _{2} x)^{\frac {\alpha }{\alpha +1}})$ for any $c'>(c(\alpha +1))^{\frac {1}{\alpha +1}}$ , where $\rho>0$ is its asymptotic density. In particular, this improves and extends upon the earlier work [Adv. Math. 370 (2020), Article 107240].

There has been recent interest in a hybrid form of the celebrated conjectures of Hardy–Littlewood and of Chowla. We prove that for any $k,\ell \ge 1$ and distinct integers $h_2,\ldots ,h_k,a_1,\ldots ,a_\ell $, we have:

$$ \begin{align*}\sum_{n\leq X}\mu(n+h_1)\cdots \mu(n+h_k)\Lambda(n+a_1)\cdots\Lambda(n+a_{\ell})=o(X)\end{align*} $$

for all except $o(H)$ values of $h_1\leq H$, so long as $H\geq (\log X)^{\ell +\varepsilon }$. This improves on the range $H\ge (\log X)^{\psi (X)}$, $\psi (X)\to \infty $, obtained in previous work of the first author. Our results also generalise from the Möbius function $\mu $ to arbitrary (non-pretentious) multiplicative functions.

Using a recent breakthrough of Smith [18], we improve the results of Fouvry and Klüners [4, 5] on the solubility of the negative Pell equation. Let $\mathcal {D}$ denote the set of positive squarefree integers having no prime factors congruent to $3$ modulo $4$ . Stevenhagen [19] conjectured that the density of d in $\mathcal {D}$ such that the negative Pell equation $x^2-dy^2=-1$ is solvable with $x, y \in \mathbb {Z}$ is $58.1\%$ , to the nearest tenth of a percent. By studying the distribution of the $8$ -rank of narrow class groups $\operatorname {\mathrm {Cl}}^+(d)$ of $\mathbb {Q}(\sqrt {d})$ , we prove that the infimum of this density is at least $53.8\%$ .

We prove that analogues of the Hardy–Littlewood generalised twin prime conjecture for almost primes hold on average. Our main theorem establishes an asymptotic formula for the number of integers $n=p_1p_2 \leq X$ such that $n+h$ is a product of exactly two primes which holds for almost all $|h|\leq H$ with $\log^{19+\varepsilon}X\leq H\leq X^{1-\varepsilon}$ , under a restriction on the size of one of the prime factors of n and $n+h$ . Additionally, we consider correlations $n,n+h$ where n is a prime and $n+h$ has exactly two prime factors, establishing an asymptotic formula which holds for almost all $|h| \leq H$ with $X^{1/6+\varepsilon}\leq H\leq X^{1-\varepsilon}$ .