On Montgomery’s pair correlation conjecture: A tale of three integrals

Abstract We study three integrals related to the celebrated pair correlation conjecture of H. L. Montgomery. The first is the integral of Montgomery’s function F ⁢ ( α , T ) {F(\alpha,T)} in bounded intervals, the second is an integral introduced by Selberg related to estimating the variance of primes in short intervals, and the last is the second moment of the logarithmic derivative of the Riemann zeta-function near the critical line. The conjectured asymptotic for any of these three integrals is equivalent to Montgomery’s pair correlation conjecture. Assuming the Riemann hypothesis, we substantially improve the known upper and lower bounds for these integrals by introducing new connections to certain extremal problems in Fourier analysis. In an appendix, we study the intriguing problem of establishing the sharp form of an embedding between two Hilbert spaces of entire functions naturally connected to Montgomery’s pair correlation conjecture.