On the first occurrences of gaps between primes in a residue class (2002.02115v4)

Abstract: We study the first occurrences of gaps between primes in the arithmetic progression (P): $r$, $r+q$, $r+2q$, $r+3q,\ldots,$ where $q$ and $r$ are coprime integers, $q>r\ge1$. The growth trend and distribution of the first-occurrence gap sizes are similar to those of maximal gaps between primes in (P). The histograms of first-occurrence gap sizes, after appropriate rescaling, are well approximated by the Gumbel extreme value distribution. Computations suggest that first-occurrence gaps are much more numerous than maximal gaps: there are $O(\log^2 x)$ first-occurrence gaps between primes in (P) below $x$, while the number of maximal gaps is only $O(\log x)$. We explore the connection between the asymptotic density of gaps of a given size and the corresponding generalization of Brun's constant. For the first occurrence of gap $d$ in (P), we expect the end-of-gap prime $p\asymp\sqrt{d}\exp(\sqrt{d/\varphi(q)})$ infinitely often. Finally, we study the gap size as a function of its index in the sequence of first-occurrence gaps.