I’ve just uploaded to the arXiv my paper “Equivalence of the logarithmically averaged Chowla and Sarnak conjectures“, submitted to the Festschrift “Number Theory – Diophantine problems, uniform distribution and applications” in honour of Robert F. Tichy. This paper is a spinoff of my previous paper establishing a logarithmically averaged version of the Chowla (and Elliott) conjectures in the two-point case. In that paper, the estimate

$\displaystyle \sum_{n \leq x} \frac{\lambda(n) \lambda(n+h)}{n} = o( \log x )$

as ${x \rightarrow \infty}$ was demonstrated, where ${h}$ was any positive integer and ${\lambda}$ denoted the Liouville function. The proof proceeded using a method I call the “entropy decrement argument”, which ultimately reduced matters to establishing a bound of the form

$\displaystyle \sum_{n \leq x} \frac{|\sum_{h \leq H} \lambda(n+h) e( \alpha h)|}{n} = o( H \log x )$

whenever ${H}$ was a slowly growing function of ${x}$. This was in turn established in a previous paper of Matomaki, Radziwill, and myself, using the recent breakthrough of Matomaki and Radziwill.

It is natural to see to what extent the arguments can be adapted to attack the higher-point cases of the logarithmically averaged Chowla conjecture (ignoring for this post the more general Elliott conjecture for other bounded multiplicative functions than the Liouville function). That is to say, one would like to prove that

$\displaystyle \sum_{n \leq x} \frac{\lambda(n+h_1) \dots \lambda(n+h_k)}{n} = o( \log x )$

as ${x \rightarrow \infty}$ for any fixed distinct integers ${h_1,\dots,h_k}$. As it turns out (and as is detailed in the current paper), the entropy decrement argument extends to this setting (after using some known facts about linear equations in primes), and allows one to reduce the above estimate to an estimate of the form

$\displaystyle \sum_{n \leq x} \frac{1}{n} \| \lambda \|_{U^d[n, n+H]} = o( \log x )$

for ${H}$ a slowly growing function of ${x}$ and some fixed ${d}$ (in fact we can take ${d=k-1}$ for ${k \geq 3}$), where ${U^d}$ is the (normalised) local Gowers uniformity norm. (In the case ${k=3}$, ${d=2}$, this becomes the Fourier-uniformity conjecture discussed in this previous post.) If one then applied the (now proven) inverse conjecture for the Gowers norms, this estimate is in turn equivalent to the more complicated looking assertion

$\displaystyle \sum_{n \leq x} \frac{1}{n} \sup |\sum_{h \leq H} \lambda(n+h) F( g^h x )| = o( \log x ) \ \ \ \ \ (1)$

where the supremum is over all possible choices of nilsequences ${h \mapsto F(g^h x)}$ of controlled step and complexity (see the paper for definitions of these terms).

The main novelty in the paper (elaborating upon a previous comment I had made on this blog) is to observe that this latter estimate in turn follows from the logarithmically averaged form of Sarnak’s conjecture (discussed in this previous post), namely that

$\displaystyle \sum_{n \leq x} \frac{1}{n} \lambda(n) F( T^n x )= o( \log x )$

whenever ${n \mapsto F(T^n x)}$ is a zero entropy (i.e. deterministic) sequence. Morally speaking, this follows from the well-known fact that nilsequences have zero entropy, but the presence of the supremum in (1) means that we need a little bit more; roughly speaking, we need the class of nilsequences of a given step and complexity to have “uniformly zero entropy” in some sense.

On the other hand, it was already known (see previous post) that the Chowla conjecture implied the Sarnak conjecture, and similarly for the logarithmically averaged form of the two conjectures. Putting all these implications together, we obtain the pleasant fact that the logarithmically averaged Sarnak and Chowla conjectures are equivalent, which is the main result of the current paper. There have been a large number of special cases of the Sarnak conjecture worked out (when the deterministic sequence involved came from a special dynamical system), so these results can now also be viewed as partial progress towards the Chowla conjecture also (at least with logarithmic averaging). However, my feeling is that the full resolution of these conjectures will not come from these sorts of special cases; instead, conjectures like the Fourier-uniformity conjecture in this previous post look more promising to attack.

It would also be nice to get rid of the pesky logarithmic averaging, but this seems to be an inherent requirement of the entropy decrement argument method, so one would probably have to find a way to avoid that argument if one were to remove the log averaging.