Bounded length intervals containing two primes and an almost-prime

James Maynard

Published 2012-05-22Version 1

Goldston, Pintz and Y\i ld\i r\i m have shown that if the primes have `level of distribution' $\theta$ for some $\theta>1/2$ then there exists a constant $C(\theta)$, such that there are infinitely many integers $n$ for which the interval $[n,n+C(\theta)]$ contains two primes. We show under the same assumption that for any integer $k\ge 1$ there exists constants $D(\theta,k)$ and $r(\theta,k)$, such that there are infinitely many integers $n$ for which the interval $[n,n+D(\theta,k)]$ contains two primes and $k$ almost-primes, with all of the almost-primes having at most $r(\theta,k)$ prime factors. If $\theta$ can be taken as large as $1-\epsilon$, and provided that numbers with 2, 3, or 4 prime factors also have level of distribution $1-\epsilon$, we show that there are infinitely many integers $n$ such that the interval $[n,n+90]$ contains 2 primes and a number with at most 4 prime factors.