Directional maximal function along the primes

Abstract

We study a two-dimensional discrete directional maximal operator along the set of the prime numbers. We show existence of a set of vectors, which are lattice points in a sufficiently large annulus, for which the $\ell^2$ norm of the associated maximal operator with supremum taken over all large scales grows with an epsilon power in the number of vectors. This paper is a follow-up to a prior work on the discrete directional maximal operator along the integers by the first and third author.