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I have been wondering about the distribution in the complex plane of Gaussian primes -- essentially those numbers $a + i b$ where $a, b$ are integers and $a^2+b^2$ is a prime number [I know there is another sort but confined on the real line]. Examples are $5+2i$ or $4+i$ (signums are irrelevant of course).

My initial query was about the distribution of phases, i.e. arguments (say $\arctan b/a$), which seems to be uniform -- though one would need some clearcut definition of ``uniform'' if one wants to check, say, Weyl's criterion here.

Another reasonable conjecture is that there exists such Gaussian primes for any given $a$ (resp. $b$). Perhaps even infinitely many? This latter conjectures includes existing conjectures, like whether there exists infinitely many primes succeeding squares, e.g. $p= a^2+1$.

I have looked around and found a question here but it does really answer mine. The last conjecture appears also here and is a special case of Schintzel's H hypothesis.

This distribution has some inherent beauty if nothing else:here are the 1000 first ones with $0<b<a$)

  • The existence of infinite primes of the form $n^2+1$ is a long-standing conjecture (on the other hand, Iwaniec and Friedlander proved that there are infinite primes of the form $a^2+b^4$), but the distribution of the arguments should be simpler to deal with through Chebotarev-like results. Interesting question. – Jack D'Aurizio Jan 14 '18 at 14:49
  • Relevant (Erdos-Hall): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012365X9800329X/pdf?md5=65e690020aca4d77204273aceef41233&pid=1-s2.0-S0012365X9800329X-main.pdf – Jack D'Aurizio Jan 14 '18 at 17:25
  • Somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_moat – Qiaochu Yuan Jan 14 '18 at 20:39
  • Nice other problem, could be related indeed! – Emmanuel Amiot Feb 20 '18 at 14:55

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