Quantitative bounds for Gowers uniformity of the Mobius and von Mangoldt functions

Joni Teräväinen and myself have just uploaded to the arXiv our preprint “Quantitative bounds for Gowers uniformity of the Möbius and von Mangoldt functions“. This paper makes quantitative the Gowers uniformity estimates on the Möbius function and the von Mangoldt function .

To discuss the results we first discuss the situation of the Möbius function, which is technically simpler in some (though not all) ways. We assume familiarity with Gowers norms and standard notations around these norms, such as the averaging notation and the exponential notation . The prime number theorem in qualitative form asserts that

as . With Vinogradov-Korobov error term, the prime number theorem is strengthened to

we refer to such decay bounds (With type factors) as pseudopolynomial decay. Equivalently, we obtain pseudopolynomial decay of Gowers seminorm of :

As is well known, the Riemann hypothesis would be equivalent to an upgrade of this estimate to polynomial decay of the form

for any .

Once one restricts to arithmetic progressions, the situation gets worse: the Siegel-Walfisz theorem gives the bound

for any residue class and any , but with the catch that the implied constant is ineffective in . This ineffectivity cannot be removed without further progress on the notorious Siegel zero problem.

In 1937, Davenport was able to show the discorrelation estimate

for any uniformly in , which leads (by standard Fourier arguments) to the Fourier uniformity estimate

Again, the implied constant is ineffective. If one insists on effective constants, the best bound currently available is

for some small effective constant .

For the situation with the norm the previously known results were much weaker. Ben Green and I showed that

uniformly for any , any degree two (filtered) nilmanifold , any polynomial sequence , and any Lipschitz function ; again, the implied constants are ineffective. On the other hand, in a separate paper of Ben Green and myself, we established the following inverse theorem: if for instance we knew that

for some , then there exists a degree two nilmanifold of dimension , complexity , a polynomial sequence , and Lipschitz function of Lipschitz constant such that

Putting the two assertions together and comparing all the dependencies on parameters, one can establish the qualitative decay bound

However the decay rate produced by this argument is completely ineffective: obtaining a bound on when this quantity dips below a given threshold depends on the implied constant in (3) for some whose dimension depends on , and the dependence on obtained in this fashion is ineffective in the face of a Siegel zero.

For higher norms , the situation is even worse, because the quantitative inverse theory for these norms is poorer, and indeed it was only with the recent work of Manners that any such bound is available at all (at least for ). Basically, Manners establishes if

then there exists a degree nilmanifold of dimension , complexity , a polynomial sequence , and Lipschitz function of Lipschitz constant such that

(We allow all implied constants to depend on .) Meanwhile, the bound (3) was extended to arbitrary nilmanifolds by Ben and myself. Again, the two results when concatenated give the qualitative decay

but the decay rate is completely ineffective.

Our first result gives an effective decay bound:

Theorem 1 For any , we have for some . The implied constants are effective.

This is off by a logarithm from the best effective bound (2) in the case. In the case there is some hope to remove this logarithm based on the improved quantitative inverse theory currently available in this case, but there is a technical obstruction to doing so which we will discuss later in this post. For the above bound is the best one could hope to achieve purely using the quantitative inverse theory of Manners.

We have analogues of all the above results for the von Mangoldt function . Here a complication arises that does not have mean close to zero, and one has to subtract off some suitable approximant to before one would expect good Gowers norms bounds. For the prime number theorem one can just use the approximant , giving

but even for the prime number theorem in arithmetic progressions one needs a more accurate approximant. In our paper it is convenient to use the “Cramér approximant”

where

and is the quasipolynomial quantity

Then one can show from the Siegel-Walfisz theorem and standard bilinear sum methods that

and

for all and (with an ineffective dependence on ), again regaining effectivity if is replaced by a sufficiently small constant . All the previously stated discorrelation and Gowers uniformity results for then have analogues for , and our main result is similarly analogous:

Theorem 2 For any , we have for some . The implied constants are effective.

By standard methods, this result also gives quantitative asymptotics for counting solutions to various systems of linear equations in primes, with error terms that gain a factor of with respect to the main term.

We now discuss the methods of proof, focusing first on the case of the Möbius function. Suppose first that there is no “Siegel zero”, by which we mean a quadratic character of some conductor with a zero with for some small absolute constant . In this case the Siegel-Walfisz bound (1) improves to a quasipolynomial bound

To establish Theorem 1 in this case, it suffices by Manners’ inverse theorem to establish the polylogarithmic bound

for all degree nilmanifolds of dimension and complexity , all polynomial sequences , and all Lipschitz functions of norm . If the nilmanifold had bounded dimension, then one could repeat the arguments of Ben and myself more or less verbatim to establish this claim from (5), which relied on the quantitative equidistribution theory on nilmanifolds developed in a separate paper of Ben and myself. Unfortunately, in the latter paper the dependence of the quantitative bounds on the dimension was not explicitly given. In an appendix to the current paper, we go through that paper to account for this dependence, showing that all exponents depend at most doubly exponentially in the dimension , which is barely sufficient to handle the dimension of that arises here.

Now suppose we have a Siegel zero . In this case the bound (5) will not hold in general, and hence also (6) will not hold either. Here, the usual way out (while still maintaining effective estimates) is to approximate not by , but rather by a more complicated approximant that takes the Siegel zero into account, and in particular is such that one has the (effective) pseudopolynomial bound

for all residue classes . The Siegel approximant to is actually a little bit complicated, and to our knowledge the first appearance of this sort of approximant only appears as late as this 2010 paper of Germán and Katai. Our version of this approximant is defined as the multiplicative function such that

when , and

when is coprime to all primes , and is a normalising constant given by the formula

(this constant ends up being of size and plays only a minor role in the analysis). This is a rather complicated formula, but it seems to be virtually the only choice of approximant that allows for bounds such as (7) to hold. (This is the one aspect of the problem where the von Mangoldt theory is simpler than the Möbius theory, as in the former one only needs to work with very rough numbers for which one does not need to make any special accommodations for the behavior at small primes when introducing the Siegel correction term.) With this starting point it is then possible to repeat the analysis of my previous papers with Ben and obtain the pseudopolynomial discorrelation bound

for as before, which when combined with Manners’ inverse theorem gives the doubly logarithmic bound

Meanwhile, a direct sieve-theoretic computation ends up giving the singly logarithmic bound

(indeed, there is a good chance that one could improve the bounds even further, though it is not helpful for this current argument to do so). Theorem 1 then follows from the triangle inequality for the Gowers norm. It is interesting that the Siegel approximant seems to play a rather essential component in the proof, even if it is absent in the final statement. We note that this approximant seems to be a useful tool to explore the “illusory world” of the Siegel zero further; see for instance the recent paper of Chinis for some work in this direction.

For the analogous problem with the von Mangoldt function (assuming a Siegel zero for sake of discussion), the approximant is simpler; we ended up using

which allows one to state the standard prime number theorem in arithmetic progressions with classical error term and Siegel zero term compactly as

Routine modifications of previous arguments also give

and

The one tricky new step is getting from the discorrelation estimate (8) to the Gowers uniformity estimate

One cannot directly apply Manners’ inverse theorem here because and are unbounded. There is a standard tool for getting around this issue, now known as the dense model theorem, which is the standard engine powering the transference principle from theorems about bounded functions to theorems about certain types of unbounded functions. However the quantitative versions of the dense model theorem in the literature are expensive and would basically weaken the doubly logarithmic gain here to a triply logarithmic one. Instead, we bypass the dense model theorem and directly transfer the inverse theorem for bounded functions to an inverse theorem for unbounded functions by using the densification approach to transference introduced by Conlon, Fox, and Zhao. This technique turns out to be quantitatively quite efficient (the dependencies of the main parameters in the transference are polynomial in nature), and also has the technical advantage of avoiding the somewhat tricky “correlation condition” present in early transference results which are also not beneficial for quantitative bounds.

In principle, the above results can be improved for due to the stronger quantitative inverse theorems in the setting. However, there is a bottleneck that prevents us from achieving this, namely that the equidistribution theory of two-step nilmanifolds has exponents which are exponential in the dimension rather than polynomial in the dimension, and as a consequence we were unable to improve upon the doubly logarithmic results. Specifically, if one is given a sequence of bracket quadratics such as that fails to be -equidistributed, one would need to establish a nontrivial linear relationship modulo 1 between the (up to errors of ), where the coefficients are of size ; current methods only give coefficient bounds of the form . An old result of Schmidt demonstrates proof of concept that these sorts of polynomial dependencies on exponents is possible in principle, but actually implementing Schmidt’s methods here seems to be a quite non-trivial task. There is also another possible route to removing a logarithm, which is to strengthen the inverse theorem to make the dimension of the nilmanifold logarithmic in the uniformity parameter rather than polynomial. Again, the Freiman-Bilu theorem (see for instance this paper of Ben and myself) demonstrates proof of concept that such an improvement in dimension is possible, but some work would be needed to implement it.

254A, Notes 1: Elementary multiplicative number theory

In analytic number theory, an arithmetic function is simply a function from the natural numbers to the real or complex numbers. (One occasionally also considers arithmetic functions taking values in more general rings than or , as in this previous blog post, but we will restrict attention here to the classical situation of real or complex arithmetic functions.) Experience has shown that a particularly tractable and relevant class of arithmetic functions for analytic number theory are the multiplicative functions, which are arithmetic functions with the additional property that

whenever are coprime. (One also considers arithmetic functions, such as the logarithm function or the von Mangoldt function, that are not genuinely multiplicative, but interact closely with multiplicative functions, and can be viewed as “derived” versions of multiplicative functions; see this previous post.) A typical example of a multiplicative function is the divisor function

that counts the number of divisors of a natural number . (The divisor function is also denoted in the literature.) The study of asymptotic behaviour of multiplicative functions (and their relatives) is known as multiplicative number theory, and is a basic cornerstone of modern analytic number theory.
There are various approaches to multiplicative number theory, each of which focuses on different asymptotic statistics of arithmetic functions . In elementary multiplicative number theory, which is the focus of this set of notes, particular emphasis is given on the following two statistics of a given arithmetic function :

1. The summatory functions

   

   of an arithmetic function , as well as the associated natural density

   

   (if it exists).

2. The logarithmic sums

   

   of an arithmetic function , as well as the associated logarithmic density

   

   (if it exists).

Here, we are normalising the arithmetic function being studied to be of roughly unit size up to logarithms, obeying bounds such as , , or at worst

A classical case of interest is when is an indicator function of some set of natural numbers, in which case we also refer to the natural or logarithmic density of as the natural or logarithmic density of respectively. However, in analytic number theory it is usually more convenient to replace such indicator functions with other related functions that have better multiplicative properties. For instance, the indicator function of the primes is often replaced with the von Mangoldt function .
Typically, the logarithmic sums are relatively easy to control, but the summatory functions require more effort in order to obtain satisfactory estimates; see Exercise 7 below.
If an arithmetic function is multiplicative (or closely related to a multiplicative function), then there is an important further statistic on an arithmetic function beyond the summatory function and the logarithmic sum, namely the Dirichlet series

for various real or complex numbers . Under the hypothesis (3), this series is absolutely convergent for real numbers , or more generally for complex numbers with . As we will see below the fold, when is multiplicative then the Dirichlet series enjoys an important Euler product factorisation which has many consequences for analytic number theory.
In the elementary approach to multiplicative number theory presented in this set of notes, we consider Dirichlet series only for real numbers (and focusing particularly on the asymptotic behaviour as ); in later notes we will focus instead on the important complex-analytic approach to multiplicative number theory, in which the Dirichlet series (4) play a central role, and are defined not only for complex numbers with large real part, but are often extended analytically or meromorphically to the rest of the complex plane as well.

Remark 1 The elementary and complex-analytic approaches to multiplicative number theory are the two classical approaches to the subject. One could also consider a more “Fourier-analytic” approach, in which one studies convolution-type statistics such as

as for various cutoff functions , such as smooth, compactly supported functions. See this previous blog post for an instance of such an approach. Another related approach is the “pretentious” approach to multiplicative number theory currently being developed by Granville-Soundararajan and their collaborators. We will occasionally make reference to these more modern approaches in these notes, but will primarily focus on the classical approaches.

To reverse the process and derive control on summatory functions or logarithmic sums starting from control of Dirichlet series is trickier, and usually requires one to allow to be complex-valued rather than real-valued if one wants to obtain really accurate estimates; we will return to this point in subsequent notes. However, there is a cheap way to get upper bounds on such sums, known as Rankin’s trick, which we will discuss later in these notes.
The basic strategy of elementary multiplicative theory is to first gather useful estimates on the statistics of “smooth” or “non-oscillatory” functions, such as the constant function , the harmonic function , or the logarithm function ; one also considers the statistics of periodic functions such as Dirichlet characters. These functions can be understood without any multiplicative number theory, using basic tools from real analysis such as the (quantitative version of the) integral test or summation by parts. Once one understands the statistics of these basic functions, one can then move on to statistics of more arithmetically interesting functions, such as the divisor function (2) or the von Mangoldt function that we will discuss below. A key tool to relate these functions to each other is that of Dirichlet convolution, which is an operation that interacts well with summatory functions, logarithmic sums, and particularly well with Dirichlet series.
This is only an introduction to elementary multiplicative number theory techniques. More in-depth treatments may be found in this text of Montgomery-Vaughan, or this text of Bateman-Diamond.