1 Introduction and main results
Let $s=\sigma +it$ be the complex variable and let $\zeta (s)$ denote the Riemann zeta-function. For any positive integer $k\geq 2$ , let $\tau _{k}$ denote the k-factors divisor function defined by ${\textbf {1}*\textbf {1}*\cdots *\textbf {1}}_{}$ and $\tau =\tau _{2}$ . Here $*$ denotes the Dirichlet convolution of arithmetic functions and $\textbf {1}$ is given by $\textbf {1}(n)=1$ for any positive integer n. We define the error term $\Delta _{k}(x)$ in the generalised divisor problem by
where $Q_{k}(\log x)={\mathrm {Res}}_{s=1}\,\zeta ^{k}(s){x^{s-1}}/{s}$ is a polynomial in $\log x$ of degree $k-1$ . The order of magnitude of $\Delta _{k}(x)$ as $x\to \infty $ is an open problem called the Piltz divisor problem and it has attracted much interest in analytic number theory. It has been conjectured that
for any integer $k\geq 2$ and any $\varepsilon>0$ (see Ivić [Reference Ivić7, Chapter 13] or Titchmarsh [Reference Titchmarsh14]). Let $\mu $ denote the Möbius function defined by
and let $\gcd (n_{1},\ldots ,n_{k})$ denote the greatest common divisor of the positive integers $n_{1},\ldots ,n_{k}$ for any integer $k\geq 2$ . For a real number $x>3$ , let $S_{f,k}(x)$ denote the summatory function
where f is any arithmetic function, by summing over the hyperbolic region $\{(n_{1},\ldots ,n_{k}) \in {\mathbb N}^{k}:\ n_{1}\ldots n_{k}\leq x \}$ . In 2012, Krätzel et al. [Reference Krätzel, Nowak and Tóth10] showed that
where
(see also Heyman and Tóth [Reference Heyman and Tóth3], Kiuchi and Saad Eddin [Reference Kiuchi and Saad Eddin8]). If f is multiplicative, then (1.4) is multiplicative. We use (1.4) to get the formal Dirichlet series
which converges absolutely in the half-plane $\sigma>\sigma _{0}$ , where $\sigma _{0}$ depends on f and k.
When $f={\mathrm {id}}$ , it follows from (1.5) that
Here the symbol $\mathrm {id}$ is given by $\mathrm {id}(n)=n$ for any positive integer n. For $k=2$ , Krätzel et al. [Reference Krätzel, Nowak and Tóth10] used the following three methods:
-
(1) the complex integration approach (see [Reference Ivić7, Reference Titchmarsh14]);
-
(2) a combination of fractional part sums and the theory of exponent pairs (see [Reference Graham and Kolesnik2, Reference Krätzel9]); and
-
(3) Huxley’s method (see [Reference Huxley4–Reference Huxley and Watt6]),
to prove
Here $\theta $ satisfies $\tfrac 12 < \theta <1$ , $\theta '$ is some real number and $P_{2}$ is a certain quadratic polynomial with
They showed that methods (1), (2) and (3) imply the results $\theta =\tfrac 23$ and $\theta '={16}/{9}$ , $\theta ={925}/{1392}$ and $\theta '=0$ , and $\theta ={547}/{832}$ and $\theta '={26947}/{8320}$ , respectively. Let $\phi $ denote the Euler totient function defined by $ \phi ={\mathrm {id}}*\mu. $ The Dirichlet series (1.5) with $f=\phi $ implies that
We consider some properties of the hyperbolic summation for the Euler totient function involving the gcd. The first purpose of this paper is to investigate the asymptotic behaviour of (1.3) with $f=\phi $ for $k=2$ . Applying fractional part sums and the theory of exponent pairs, we obtain the following result.
Theorem 1.1. For any real number $x>3$ ,
where $\gamma $ and $\gamma _{1}$ are the Euler constant and the first Stieltjes constant, respectively.
We note that the main term of (1.8) is given by (7.2) below.
Remark 1.2. Note that $\tfrac 12 < {55}/{84}=\tfrac 12+ {13}/{84}<{547}/{832}= \tfrac 12 +{131}/{832}$ .
The summation for the arithmetic functions $h(n)$ in the Dirichlet series
for $\mathrm {Re}~s>1$ and any fixed integer M was considered by Kühleitner and Nowak [Reference Kühleitner and Nowak11] in 2013. We use their results to show that the error term on the right-hand side of (1.8) is $\Omega (x^{1/2}{\log ^{2}x}/{\log \log x})$ as $x\to \infty $ . This suggests the following conjecture.
Conjecture 1.3. The order of magnitude of the error term on the right-hand side of (1.8) is $ O(x^{1/2}(\log x)^{A}) $ with $A>2$ .
When $k=3$ , Krätzel et al. [Reference Krätzel, Nowak and Tóth10] also derived the formula
where
For $k=3$ , we derive an asymptotic formula for (1.3) with $f=\phi $ by using the complex integration approach.
Theorem 1.4. For any real number $x>3$ ,
where $\gamma $ and $\gamma _{1}$ are the Euler constant and the first Stieltjes constant, respectively.
We note that the main term of (1.9) is given by (7.3) below.
For $k=4$ , we use the complex integration approach to calculate the asymptotic formula for (1.3) with $f=\phi $ .
Theorem 1.5. For any real number $x>3$ ,
where ${P}_{\phi ,4}(u)$ is a polynomial in u of degree three depending on $\phi $ .
For $k=5$ , from Ivić [Reference Ivić7, Theorem 13.2], the error term $\Delta _{5}(x)$ is estimated by
for any $\varepsilon>0$ . We use an elementary method and (1.1) to obtain the following result.
Theorem 1.6. For any real number $x>3$ ,
where ${P}_{\phi ,5}(u)$ is a polynomial in u of degree four depending on $\phi $ . In particular, it follows from (1.11) that the error term on the right-hand side of (1.12) is $O(x^{{11}/{20}+\varepsilon }).$
Remark 1.7. If we can use Conjecture (1.2) with $k=5$ , then the error term on the right-hand side of (1.12) becomes $O(x^{{2}/{5}+\varepsilon })$ .
Assuming Conjecture (1.2), it is easy to obtain an asymptotic formula for $S_{\phi ,k}(x)$ for any integer $k \geq 5$ .
Proposition 1.8. Assume Conjecture (1.2). With the previous notation,
for any real number $x>3$ , where ${P}_{\phi ,k}(u)\ (k \geq 5)$ is a polynomial in u of degree $k-1$ depending on $\phi $ .
Notation
We denote by $\varepsilon $ an arbitrary small positive number which may be different at each occurrence.
2 Auxiliary results
We will need the following lemma.
Lemma 2.1. For $t\geq t_{0}>0$ , uniformly in $\sigma $ ,
Proof. The lemma follows from Tenenbaum [Reference Tenenbaum13, Theorem II.3.8]; see also Ivić [Reference Ivić7] or Titchmarsh [Reference Titchmarsh14].
3 Proof of Theorem 1.1
Our main work is to evaluate the sum $ A(x)=\sum _{mnl^{2}\leq x,\, m,n,l>0}l $ . We utilise [Reference Krätzel, Nowak and Tóth10, Section 3.2] to derive the formula
where the error term $\Delta (x)$ is estimated by $O(x^{1/4+(\alpha+\beta)/2})$ . Here $(\alpha ,\beta )$ is an exponent pair (see [Reference Graham and Kolesnik2, Reference Ivić7]) and $M_{1}(x)$ is the main term given by
From (1.7), this gives
where the main term $M_{2}(x)$ is given by
by (7.2) below. Choosing, in particular, the exponent pair
discovered by Bourgain [Reference Bourgain1, Theorem 6], we obtain the order of magnitude $ O(x^{{55}/{84}+\varepsilon }) $ of the error term on the right-hand side of (3.1). This completes the proof of Theorem 1.1.
4 Preparations for the proof of Theorems 1.4 and 1.5
In order to derive the formulas (1.9) and (1.10), we use the following notation. Let k be any integer such that $k \geq 3$ and let $ \sigma _{0} =1+{1}/{k}+\varepsilon. $ Consider the estimation of the error terms of Perron’s formula (see [Reference Montgomery and Vaughan12, Theorem 5.2 and Corollary 5.3]) for (1.4) with $f=\phi $ . The estimation of $g_{\phi ,k}(n)$ is given by
In Perron’s formula,
for $T\leq x$ . Hence, from Perron’s formula and (1.7),
for any real number $x>3$ . When $k=3$ , we move the line of integration to $\mathrm {Re}~s=\tfrac 12$ and consider the rectangular contour formed by the line segments joining the points $c_{0}-iT$ , $c_{0}+iT$ , $\tfrac 12+iT$ , $\tfrac 12-iT$ and $c_{0}-iT$ in the anticlockwise sense. We observe that the integrand has a triple pole at $s=1$ and a simple pole at $s=\tfrac 23$ . Thus, we obtain the main term from the sum of the residues coming from the poles at $s=1$ and $\tfrac 23$ . Hence, using the Cauchy residue theorem,
where
Here the integrals are given by
Similarly,
where
with $ a={1}/{\log T}$ for any large number $T(>5)$ .
5 Proofs of Theorems 1.4 and 1.5
5.1 Proof of the formula (1.9)
Consider the estimate $I_{3,1}(x,T)$ . We use Lemma 2.1 and (4.3) to deduce the estimation
Similarly, the estimation of $ I_{3,3}(x,T) $ is of the same order. Hence, taking $T=x^{}$ in the estimations of $I_{3,1}(x,T)$ and $I_{3,3}(x,T)$ , we find that the total contribution of the horizontal lines in absolute value is
Now we estimate $I_{3,2}(x,T)$ . We use (4.4), the estimate $ \zeta (\tfrac 32+it) \asymp 1 $ for $t\geq 1$ , the well-known estimate
for any large T and the Hölder inequality to obtain the estimate
Taking $T=x^{}$ in (5.1), (5.3) and (4.1) with $k=3$ , and substituting the above and the residue (4.2) into (4.1) with $k=3$ , we obtain the formula (1.9).
5.2 Proof of the formula (1.10)
Let $a={1}/{\log T}\ (T\geq 5)$ . From (4.5) with $k=4$ ,
since $s=1$ is a pole of $\zeta ^{4}(s)$ of order four, where $ {P}_{\phi ,4}(u)$ is a polynomial in u of degree three depending on $\phi $ . Consider the estimate $I_{4,1}(x,T)$ . From (4.6) and Lemma 2.1,
Similarly, the estimation of $ I_{4,3}(x,T) $ is of the same order. Hence, taking $T=x^{}$ in the estimations $I_{4,1}(x,T)$ and $I_{4,3}(x,T)$ , we find that the total contribution of the horizontal lines in absolute value is
We use (5.2) and the estimation $ \zeta (1+it) \ll {\log ^{2/3} t} $ for $t\geq t_{0}$ (see [Reference Ivić7, Theorem 6.3]) to obtain the estimation
We take $T=x^{}$ in (5.4), (5.5), (5.6) and (4.1) with $k=4$ to complete the proof of the formula (1.10).
6 Proof of Theorem 1.6
We use (1.4) with $k=5$ to deduce that
where $ B(x):=\sum _{lm^{5}\leq x}m\tau _{5}(l). $ From (1.1),
where $\widetilde {{Q}_{4}}(u)$ is a polynomial in u of degree four and $A_{1},A_{2},\ldots , A_{5}$ are computable constants. Inserting (6.2) into (6.1),
Hence, we obtain the formula (1.12).□
7 Appendix
To calculate the main terms of Theorems 1.1 and 1.4, we use the Laurent expansion of the Riemann zeta-function at $s=1$ : that is,
as $s\to \infty $ , where $\gamma $ is the Euler constant and $\gamma _{k}\ (k=1,2,3,\ldots )$ are the Stieltjes constants,
We need the following residues.
and
Proof. Suppose that $g(s)$ is regular in the neighbourhood of $s=1$ and $f(s)$ has only a triple pole at $s=1$ . Then the Laurent expansion of $f(s)$ implies that
where $h(s)$ is regular in the neighbourhood of $s=1$ and $a,b,c$ are computable constants. We use the residue calculation to deduce that
To prove (7.3), we use (7.1) to deduce that
Setting
we have
Hence,
Hence, we obtain the stated identity. To prove (7.2), we use
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the referee for many valuable suggestions and remarks.