English

Limit points of normalized prime gaps

Number Theory 2021-03-03 v3

Abstract

We show that at least 1/3 of positive real numbers are in the set of limit points of normalized prime gaps. More precisely, if pnp_n denotes the nnth prime and L\mathbb{L} is the set of limit points of the sequence {(pn+1pn)/logpn}n=1,\{(p_{n+1}-p_n)/\log p_n\}_{n=1}^\infty, then for all T0T\geq 0 the Lebesque measure of L[0,T]\mathbb{L} \cap [0,T] is at least T/3.T/3. This improves the result of Pintz (2015) that the Lebesque measure of L[0,T]\mathbb{L} \cap [0,T] is at least (1/4o(1))T,(1/4-o(1))T, which was obtained by a refinement of the previous ideas of Banks, Freiberg, and Maynard (2015). Our improvement comes from using Chen's sieve to give, for a certain sum over prime pairs, a better upper bound than what can be obtained using Selberg's sieve. Even though this improvement is small, a modification of the arguments Pintz and Banks, Freiberg, and Maynard shows that this is sufficient. In addition, we show that there exists a constant CC such that for all T0T \geq 0 we have L[T,T+C],\mathbb{L} \cap [T,T+C] \neq \emptyset, that is, gaps between limit points are bounded by an absolute constant.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.03008,
  title  = {Limit points of normalized prime gaps},
  author = {Jori Merikoski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.03008},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

v2: small corrections, added proof of Proposition 4 in a more general case v3: Section 6 added, which contains a correction to the proofs of Lemmata 15 and 16 of the published version (this does not affect the results)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:07:58.424Z