An average Brun-Titchmarsh theorem and shifted primes with a large prime factor

Abstract

The author studies an average version of Brun-Titchmarsh theorem with large moduli. Using Maynard's recent breakthrough on the Bombieri-Friedlander-Iwaniec type triple convolution estimates, we refine the previous result of Baker and Harman (1996). As an application, we improve a result of Baker and Harman (1998) on shifted primes with a large prime factor, showing that the largest prime factor of $p - 1$ is larger than $p^{0.679}$ for infinitely many primes $p$.