Sequences with almost Poissonian Pair Correlations

Abstract

Although a generic uniformly distributed sequence has Poissonian pair correlations, only one explicit example has been found up to now. Additionally, it is even known that many classes of uniformly distributed sequences, like van der Corput sequences, Kronecker sequences and LS sequences, do not have Poissonian pair correlations. In this paper, we show that van der Corput sequences and the Kronecker sequence for the golden mean are as close to having Poissonian pair correlations as possible: they both have $\alpha$-pair correlations for all $0 < \alpha < 1$ but not for $\alpha = 1$ which corresponds to Poissonian pair correlations.