Intermediate-scale statistics for real-valued lacunary sequences

Abstract

We study intermediate-scale statistics for the fractional parts of the sequence $(αa_n)_{n=1}^{\infty}$, where $(a_n)_{n=1}^{\infty}$ is a positive, real-valued lacunary sequence, and $α\in\mathbb{R}$. In particular, we consider the number of elements $S_{N}(L,α)$ in a random interval of length $L/N$, where $L=O\left(N^{1-ε}\right)$, and show that its variance (the number variance) is asymptotic to $L$ with high probability w.r.t. $α$, which is in agreement with the statistics of uniform i.i.d. random points in the unit interval. In addition, we show that the same asymptotics holds almost surely in $α\in\mathbb{R}$ when $L=O\left(N^{1/2-ε}\right)$. For slowly growing $L$, we further prove a central limit theorem for $S_{N}(L,α)$ which holds for almost all $α\in\mathbb{R}$.