Poisson Tail Conjecture for gaps between consecutive primes

About 1 year old · traced to

Let pnp_n denote the nnth prime, and let ε>0\varepsilon>0. Poisson Tail Conjecture. For 1≤H≤(log⁡X)2−ε1\leq H\leq(\log X)^{2-\varepsilon}, the two gap-counting quantities satisfy

∑pn+1≤Xpn+1−pn≥H1≍e−H/log⁡XXlog⁡X,\sum_{\substack{p_{n+1}\leq X \\ p_{n+1}-p_n\geq H}}1\asymp e^{-H/\log X}\frac{X}{\log X}, ∑pn+1≤Xpn+1−pn≥H(pn+1−pn)≍(1+Hlog⁡X)e−H/log⁡XX.\sum_{\substack{p_{n+1}\leq X \\ p_{n+1}-p_n\geq H}}(p_{n+1}-p_n)\asymp\left(1+\frac{H}{\log X}\right)e^{-H/\log X}X.

For H>(log⁡X)2+εH>(\log X)^{2+\varepsilon} and XX sufficiently large, both quantities vanish. This conjecture models prime gaps as having Poisson tails at the scale of the average gap log⁡X\log X; the stated ranges and asymptotics are not currently known in full.

References

Primary source

Noah Kravitz, Katharine Woo and Max Wenqiang Xu, “The distribution of prime values of random polynomials”, arXiv:2512.03292 (2025).

Progress summary

Never refreshed

Nothing recorded yet. Refresh searches the literature and the public web for attempts on this problem, and writes the first summary here.

Solutions 0

No solutions have been posted yet.