Lemke Oliver and Soundararajan bias for consecutive sums of two squares

Abstract

In a surprising recent work, Lemke Oliver and Soundararajan noticed how experimental data exhibits erratic distributions for consecutive pairs of primes in arithmetic progressions, and proposed a heuristic model based on the Hardy--Littlewood conjectures containing a large secondary term, which fits the data very well. In this paper, we study consecutive pairs of sums of squares in arithmetic progressions, and develop a similar heuristic model based on the Hardy--Littlewood conjecture for sums of squares, which also explain the biases in the experimental data. In the process, we prove several results related to averages of the Hardy--Littlewood constant in the context of sums of two squares.