English

On the proximity of large primes

Number Theory 2017-11-17 v1

Abstract

By a sphere-packing argument, we show that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that are close to each other for some metrics on the integers. In particular, for any numeration basis qq, we show that there are infinitely many pairs of primes the base qq expansion of which differ in at most two digits. Likewise, for any fixed integer t,t, there are infinitely many pairs of primes, the first tt digits of which are the same. In another direction, we show that, there is a constant cc depending on qq such that for infinitely many integers mm there are at least cloglogmc\log \log m primes which differ from mm by at most one base qq digit.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.05793,
  title  = {On the proximity of large primes},
  author = {Minjia Shi and Florian Luca and Patrick Solé},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.05793},
  year   = {2017}
}