Physically inspired analysis of prime number constellations

Abstract

We adopt a physically motivated empirical approach to the characterisation of the distributions of twin and triplet primes within the set of primes, rather than in the set of all natural numbers. Remarkably, the occurrences of twins or triplets in any finite sequence of primes are like fixed-probability random events. The respective probabilities are not constant, but instead depend on the length of the sequence in ways that we have been able to parameterise. For twins the ``decay constant'' decreases as the reciprocal of the logarithm of the length of the sequence, whereas for triplets the falloff is faster: decreasing as the square of the reciprocal of the logarithm of the number of primes. The manner of the decrease is consistent with the Hardy--Littlewood Conjectures, developed using purely number theoretic tools of analysis.