English

Explicit bounds for primes in arithmetic progressions

Number Theory 2018-11-29 v3

Abstract

We derive explicit upper bounds for various functions counting primes in arithmetic progressions. By way of example, if qq and aa are integers with gcd(a,q)=1\gcd(a,q)=1 and 3q1053 \leq q \leq 10^5, and θ(x;q,a)\theta(x;q,a) denotes the sum of the logarithms of the primes pa(modq)p \equiv a \pmod{q} with pxp \leq x, we show that θ(x;q,a)xϕ(q)<1160xlogx, \bigg| \theta (x; q, a) - \frac{x}{\phi (q)} \bigg| < \frac1{160} \frac{x}{\log x}, for all x8109x \ge 8 \cdot 10^9 (with sharper constants obtained for individual such moduli qq). We establish inequalities of the same shape for the other standard prime-counting functions π(x;q,a)\pi(x;q,a) and ψ(x;q,a)\psi(x;q,a), as well as inequalities for the nnth prime congruent to a(modq)a\pmod q when q1200q\le1200. For moduli q>105q>10^5, we find even stronger explicit inequalities, but only for much larger values of xx. Along the way, we also derive an improved explicit lower bound for L(1,χ)L(1,\chi) for quadratic characters χ\chi, and an improved explicit upper bound for exceptional zeros.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.00085,
  title  = {Explicit bounds for primes in arithmetic progressions},
  author = {Michael A. Bennett and Greg Martin and Kevin O'Bryant and Andrew Rechnitzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.00085},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

103 pages. We implemented an improvement in the method in Section 2 (which produces the bound nu(q)), resulting in a change to most of the constants in our theorems. To appear in Illinois J. Math. Results of computations, and the code used for those computations, can be found at: http://www.nt.math.ubc.ca/BeMaObRe/

R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:06:53.968Z