On the Second Hardy-Littlewood Conjecture

Abstract

The second Hardy-Littlewood conjecture asserts that the prime counting function $π(x)$ satisfies the subadditive inequality \begin{align*} π(x+y)\leqslant π(x)+π(y) \end{align*} for all integers $x,y\geqslant 2$. By linking the subadditivity of $π(x)$ to the error term in the Prime Number Theorem, we obtain unconditional improvements on the range of $y$ for which $π(x)$ is known to be subadditive. Moreover, assuming the Riemann Hypothesis, we show that for all $ε>0$, there exists $x_ε \geqslant 2$ such that for all $x\geqslant x_ε$ and $y$ in the range \begin{align*} \frac{(2+ε)\sqrt{x}\log^2x}{8π}\leqslant y\leqslant x, \end{align*} the inequality $π(x+y)\leqslant π(x) + π(y)$ holds.