Let be the Liouville function, thus is defined to equal when is the product of an even number of primes, and when is the product of an odd number of primes. The Chowla conjecture asserts that has the statistics of a random sign pattern, in the sense that

for all and all distinct natural numbers , where we use the averaging notation

For , this conjecture is equivalent to the prime number theorem (as discussed in this previous blog post), but the conjecture remains open for any .

In recent years, it has been realised that one can make more progress on this conjecture if one works instead with the logarithmically averaged version

of the conjecture, where we use the logarithmic averaging notation

Using the summation by parts (or telescoping series) identity

it is not difficult to show that the Chowla conjecture (1) for a given implies the logarithmically averaged conjecture (2). However, the converse implication is not at all clear. For instance, for , we have already mentioned that the Chowla conjecture

is equivalent to the prime number theorem; but the logarithmically averaged analogue

is significantly easier to show (a proof with the Liouville function replaced by the closely related Möbius function is given in this previous blog post). And indeed, significantly more is now known for the logarithmically averaged Chowla conjecture; in this paper of mine I had proven (2) for , and in this recent paper with Joni Teravainen, we proved the conjecture for all odd (with a different proof also given here).

In view of this emerging consensus that the logarithmically averaged Chowla conjecture was easier than the ordinary Chowla conjecture, it was thus somewhat of a surprise for me to read a recent paper of Gomilko, Kwietniak, and Lemanczyk who (among other things) established the following statement:

Theorem 1 Assume that the logarithmically averaged Chowla conjecture (2) is true for all . Then there exists a sequence going to infinity such that the Chowla conjecture (1) is true for all along that sequence, that is to say for all and all distinct .

This implication does not use any special properties of the Liouville function (other than that they are bounded), and in fact proceeds by ergodic theoretic methods, focusing in particular on the ergodic decomposition of invariant measures of a shift into ergodic measures. Ergodic methods have proven remarkably fruitful in understanding these sorts of number theoretic and combinatorial problems, as could already be seen by the ergodic theoretic proof of Szemerédi’s theorem by Furstenberg, and more recently by the work of Frantzikinakis and Host on Sarnak’s conjecture. (My first paper with Teravainen also uses ergodic theory tools.) Indeed, many other results in the subject were first discovered using ergodic theory methods.

On the other hand, many results in this subject that were first proven ergodic theoretically have since been reproven by more combinatorial means; my second paper with Teravainen is an instance of this. As it turns out, one can also prove Theorem 1 by a standard combinatorial (or probabilistic) technique known as the second moment method. In fact, one can prove slightly more:

Theorem 2 Let be a natural number. Assume that the logarithmically averaged Chowla conjecture (2) is true for . Then there exists a set of natural numbers of logarithmic density (that is, ) such that for any distinct .

It is not difficult to deduce Theorem 1 from Theorem 2 using a diagonalisation argument. Unfortunately, the known cases of the logarithmically averaged Chowla conjecture ( and odd ) are currently insufficient to use Theorem 2 for any purpose other than to reprove what is already known to be true from the prime number theorem. (Indeed, the even cases of Chowla, in either logarithmically averaged or non-logarithmically averaged forms, seem to be far more powerful than the odd cases; see Remark 1.7 of this paper of myself and Teravainen for a related observation in this direction.)

We now sketch the proof of Theorem 2. For any distinct , we take a large number and consider the limiting the second moment

We can expand this as

If all the are distinct, the hypothesis (2) tells us that the inner averages goes to zero as . The remaining averages are , and there are of these averages. We conclude that

By Markov’s inequality (and (3)), we conclude that for any fixed , there exists a set of upper logarithmic density at least , thus

such that

By deleting at most finitely many elements, we may assume that consists only of elements of size at least (say).

For any , if we let be the union of for , then has logarithmic density . By a diagonalisation argument (using the fact that the set of tuples is countable), we can then find a set of natural numbers of logarithmic density , such that for every , every sufficiently large element of lies in . Thus for every sufficiently large in , one has

for some with . By Cauchy-Schwarz, this implies that

interchanging the sums and using and , this implies that

We conclude on taking to infinity that

as required.