On the average number of divisors of reducible quadratic polynomials

Abstract

We give an asymptotic formula for the divisor sum $\sum_{c<n\leq N}\tau\left((n-b)(n-c)\right)$ for integers $b<c$ of the same parity. Interestingly, the coefficient of the main term does not depend on the discriminant as long as it is a full square. We also provide effective upper bounds of the average divisor sum for some of the reducible quadratic polynomials considered before, with the same main term as in the asymptotic formula.