Angles of Gaussian primes

Abstract

Fermat showed that every prime p = 1 mod 4 is a sum of two squares: $p = a^2 + b^2$. To any of the 8 possible representations (a,b) we associate an angle whose tangent is the ratio b/a. In 1919 Hecke showed that these angles are uniformly distributed as p varies, and in the 1950's Kubilius proved uniform distribution in somewhat short arcs. We study fine scale statistics of these angles, in particular the variance of the number of such angles in a short arc. We present a conjecture for this variance, motivated both by a random matrix model, and by a function field analogue of this problem, for which we prove an asymptotic form for the corresponding variance.