Weakening the Legendre Conjecture

TL;DR

This paper explores the existence of primes between larger powers of x, assuming the Riemann hypothesis, and discusses implications for prime gaps and Mills-type constants.

Contribution

It extends results on prime distribution between powers under RH and provides explicit bounds for smaller exponents, linking to prime-generating constants.

Findings

Primes exist between x^{2+δ} and (x+1)^{2+δ} for δ ≥ 1/4 under RH.

Explicit bounds for smaller δ > 0 are derived.

Application to Mills-type prime constants is discussed.

Abstract

The world of primes has many gaps between evidence and theorems. Here, we review Legendre's conjecture on primes between consecutive squares and recent progress on the weaker question of primes between consecutive larger powers. Assuming the Riemann hypothesis (RH), we observe that a recent result of Emanuel Carneiro, Micah Milinovich and Kannan Soundararajan, combined with a large-scale computation by Jonathan Sorenson and Jonathan Webster, implies the existence of primes between $x^{2+\delta}$ and $(x+1)^{2+\delta}$ for all real $x \geq 1$ when $\delta \geq 1/4$. For smaller values of $\delta > 0$, we provide an explicit bound $x_0 = x_0 (\delta)$ such that primes exist in these intervals whenever $x \geq x_0$ (again assuming RH). We conclude with an application to Mills-type prime-generating constants.