A remark on the conditional estimate for the sum of a prime and a square

Abstract

Hardy and Littlewood conjectured that every sufficiently large integer is either a square or the sum of a prime and a square. Let $E(x)$ be the number of positive integers up to $x\ge4$ which does not satisfy this condition. We prove $E(x)\ll x^{1/2}(\log x)^A(\log\log x)^4$with $A=3/2$ under the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis. This is a small improvement of the previous remarks of Mikawa (1993) and Perelli-Zaccagnini (1995) which claims $A=4,3$ respectively.