On prime-producing sieves and distribution of $\alpha p-\beta$ mod $1$

Abstract

The author proves that there are infinitely many primes $p$ such that $\| \alpha p - \beta \| < p^{-\frac{28}{87}}$, where $\alpha$ is an irrational number and $\beta$ is a real number. This sharpens a result of Jia (2000) and provides a new triple $(\gamma, \theta, \nu)=(\frac{59}{87}, \frac{28}{87}, \frac{1}{29})$ that can produce special primes in Ford and Maynard's work on prime-producing sieves. Our minimum amount of Type-II information required ($\nu = \frac{1}{29}$) is less than any previous work on this topic using only traditional Type-I and Type-II information.