Procounting measures and the Bateman--Horn conjecture

Abstract

Let $D$ be the ring of $S$-integers in a global field and $\da$ its profinite completion. We propose a profinite version of the Bateman--Horn conjecture over $D$ and provide a first comparison with the classical one and its generalizations. Our approach is based on the new notion of procounting measure: a distribution on $\da$ which should be seen as a profinite analogue of the counting function for a subset of $\R$. This allows us to deal with subsets of $\da$ having Haar measure $0$ (corresponding to density zero in $\R$).