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Sign Changes of the Liouville function on quadratics

Number Theory 2019-08-15 v1

Abstract

Let λ(n)\lambda (n) denote the Liouville function. Complementary to the prime number theorem, Chowla conjectured that \vspace{1mm} \noindent {\bf Conjecture (Chowla).} {\em \begin{equation} \label{a.1} \sum_{n\le x} \lambda (f(n)) =o(x) \end{equation} for any polynomial f(x)f(x) with integer coefficients which is not of form bg(x)2bg(x)^2. } \vspace{1mm} \noindent The prime number theorem is equivalent to \eqref{a.1} when f(x)=xf(x)=x. Chowla's conjecture is proved for linear functions but for the degree greater than 1, the conjecture seems to be extremely hard and still remains wide open. One can consider a weaker form of Chowla's conjecture, namely, \vspace{1mm} \noindent {\bf Conjecture 1 (Cassaigne, et al).} {\em If f(x)Z[x]f(x) \in \Z [x] and is not in the form of bg2(x)bg^2(x) for some g(x)Z[x]g(x)\in \Z[x], then λ(f(n))\lambda (f(n)) changes sign infinitely often.} Clearly, Chowla's conjecture implies Conjecture 1. Although it is weaker, Conjecture 1 is still wide open for polynomials of degree >1>1. In this article, we study Conjecture 1 for the quadratic polynomials. One of our main theorems is {\bf Theorem 1.} {\em Let f(x)=ax2+bx+cf(x) = ax^2+bx +c with a>0a>0 and ll be a positive integer such that alal is not a perfect square. Then if the equation f(n)=lm2f(n)=lm^2 has one solution (n0,m0)Z2(n_0,m_0) \in \Z^2, then it has infinitely many positive solutions (n,m)N2(n,m) \in \N^2.} As a direct consequence of Theorem 1, we prove some partial results of Conjecture 1 for quadratic polynomials are also proved by using Theorem 1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1109.3107,
  title  = {Sign Changes of the Liouville function on quadratics},
  author = {Peter Borwein and Stephen K. K. Choi and Himadri Ganguli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.3107},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:04:45.024Z