A Vinogradov-type problem in almost primes

Abstract

We prove a generalisation of Vinogradov's theorem by finding for $m\geqslant 3$ and fixed positive integers $c_1, \dots ,c_m, r_1, \dots , r_m$ the asymptotics of the number of sequences $(n_1, \dots ,n_m) \in \mathbf{N}^{m}$ such that $c_1n_1 + \dots + c_m n_m = N$ and $\Omega (n_i) = r_i$ for every $i=1, \dots ,m$ under the assumption that at least three of the $r_i$ are equal to $1$.