Residue Class Patterns of Consecutive Primes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the patterns of residue classes of consecutive primes, establishing the existence of certain non-constant patterns for large sequences and providing improved bounds on their frequency using advanced sieve methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach by modifying the Maynard-Tao sieve to analyze residue class patterns of consecutive primes for large sequences.

Findings

Existence of non-constant residue class patterns for large prime sequences.

Improved lower bounds on the number of residue class patterns attainable by consecutive primes.

Enhanced sieve techniques considering higher moments to analyze prime patterns.

Abstract

For $m,q \in \mathbb{N}$, we call an $m$-tuple $(a_1,\ldots,a_m) \in \prod_{i=1}^m (\mathbb{Z}/q\mathbb{Z})^\times$ good if there are infinitely many consecutive primes $p_1,\ldots,p_m$ satisfying $p_i \equiv a_i \pmod{q}$ for all $i$. We show that given any $m$ sufficiently large, $q$ squarefree, and $A \subseteq (\mathbb{Z}/q\mathbb{Z})^\times$ with $|A|=\lfloor 71(\log m)^3 \rfloor$, we can form at least one non-constant good $m$-tuple $(a_1,\ldots,a_m) \in \prod_{i=1}^m A$. Using this, we can provide a lower bound for the number of residue class patterns attainable by consecutive primes, and for $m$ large and $\varphi(q) \gg (\log m)^{10}$ this improves on the lower bound obtained from direct applications of Shiu (2000) and Dirichlet (1837). The main method is modifying the Maynard-Tao sieve found in Banks, Freiberg, and Maynard (2015), where instead of considering the 2nd moment we considered the $r$-th moment, where $r$ is an integer depending on $m$.