Narrow arithmetic progressions in the primes

Abstract

We study arithmetic progressions in primes with common differences as small as possible. Tao and Ziegler showed that, for any $k \geq 3$ and $N$ large, there exist non-trivial $k$-term arithmetic progressions in (any positive density subset of) the primes up to $N$ with common difference $O((\log N)^{L_k})$, for an unspecified constant $L_k$. In this work we obtain this statement with the precise value $L_k = (k-1) 2^{k-2}$. This is achieved by proving a relative version of Szemer\'{e}di's theorem for narrow progressions requiring simpler pseudorandomness hypotheses in the spirit of recent work of Conlon, Fox, and Zhao.