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On the Second Hardy-Littlewood Conjecture

Number Theory 2025-03-05 v1

Abstract

The second Hardy-Littlewood conjecture asserts that the prime counting function π(x)\pi(x) satisfies the subadditive inequality \begin{align*} \pi(x+y)\leqslant \pi(x)+\pi (y) \end{align*} for all integers x,y2x,y\geqslant 2. By linking the subadditivity of π(x)\pi(x) to the error term in the Prime Number Theorem, we obtain unconditional improvements on the range of yy for which π(x)\pi(x) is known to be subadditive. Moreover, assuming the Riemann Hypothesis, we show that for all ϵ>0\epsilon>0, there exists xϵ2x_{\epsilon} \geqslant 2 such that for all xxϵx\geqslant x_\epsilon and yy in the range \begin{align*} \frac{(2+\epsilon)\sqrt{x}\log^2x}{8\pi}\leqslant y\leqslant x, \end{align*} the inequality π(x+y)π(x)+π(y)\pi(x+y)\leqslant \pi(x) + \pi(y) holds.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.02766,
  title  = {On the Second Hardy-Littlewood Conjecture},
  author = {Bittu Chahal and Ertan Elma and Nic Fellini and Akshaa Vatwani and Do Nhat Tan Vo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.02766},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:06:39.909Z