The distribution of spacings between quadratic residues, II

We study the distribution of spacings between squares modulo q, where q is square-free and highly composite, in the limit as the number of prime factors of q goes to infinity. We show that all correlation functions are Poissonian, which among other things, implies that the spacings between nearest neighbors, normalized to have unit mean, have an exponential distribution.

If f is a polynomial with integer coefficients and q is an integer, we may regard f as a map from Z/qZ to Z/qZ. We show that the distribution of the (normalized) spacings between consecutive elements in the image of these maps becomes Poissonian as q tends to infinity along any sequence of square free integers such that the mean spacing modulo q tends to infinity.

We study the distribution of normalized spacings between the fractional parts of an^2, n=1,2,.... We conjecture that if a is "badly approximable" by rationals, then the sequence of fractional parts has Poisson spacings, and give a number of results towards this conjecture. We also present an example of a Diophantine number a for which the higher correlation functions of the sequence blow up.

In our paper, we apply additive-combinatorial methods to study the distribution of the set of squares $\mathcal{R}$ in the prime field. We obtain the best upper bound on the number of gaps in $\mathcal{R}$ at the moment and generalize this result for sets with small doubling.

We consider the distribution of spacings between consecutive elements in subsets of Z/qZ where q is highly composite and the subsets are defined via the Chinese remainder theorem. We give a sufficient criterion for the spacing distribution to be Poissonian as the number of prime factors of q tends to infinity, and as an application we show that the value set of a generic polynomial modulo q have Poisson spacings. We also study the spacings of subsets of Z/q_1q_2Z that are cre...

In this paper we study the distribution of squares modulo a square-free number $q$. We also look at inverse questions for the large sieve in the distribution aspect and we make improvements on existing results on the distribution of $s$-tuples of reduced residues.

We investigate the error term of the asymptotic formula for the number of squarefree integers up to some bound, and lying in some arithmetic progression a (mod q). In particular, we prove an upper bound for its variance as a varies over $(\mathbb{Z}/q\mathbb{Z})^{\times}$ which considerably improves upon earlier work of Blomer.

We cosider the number of r-tuples of squarefree numbers in a short interval. We prove that it cannot be much bigger than the expected value and we also estabish an asymptotic formula if the interval is not very short.

In this work we show that based on a conjecture for the pair correlation of integers representable as sums of two squares, which was first suggested by Connors and Keating and reformulated here, the second moment of the distribution of the number of representable integers in short intervals is consistent with a Poissonian distribution, where "short" means of length comparable to the mean spacing between sums of two squares. In addition we present a method for producing such c...

Consider the number of integers in a short interval that can be represented as a sum of two squares. What is an estimate for the variance of these counts over random short intervals? We resolve a function field variant of this problem in the large $q$ limit, finding a connection to the $z$-measures first investigated in the context of harmonic analysis on the infinite symmetric group. A similar connection to $z$-measures is established for sums over short intervals of the div...