Small gaps between almost primes, the parity problem, and some conjectures of Erdős on consecutive integers II
This paper is intended as a sequel to a paper arXiv:0803.2636 written by four of the coauthors here. In the paper, they proved a stronger form of the Erdős-Mirksy conjecture which states that there are infinitely many positive integers $x$ such that $d(x)=d(x+1)$ where $d(x)$ denotes the number of divisors of $x$. This conjecture was first proven by Heath-Brown in 1984, but the method did not reveal the nature of the set of values $d(x)$ for such $x$. In particular, one could not conclude that there was any particular value $A$ for which $d(x)=d(x+1)=A$ infinitely often. In the previous paper arXiv:0803.2636, the authors showed that there are infinitely many positive integers $x$ such that both $x$ and $x+1$ have exponent pattern $\{2,1,1,1\}$, so $d(x)=d(x+1)=24$. Similar results were known for certain shifts $n$, i.e., $x$ and $x+n$ have the same fixed exponent pattern infinitely often. This was done for shifts $n$ which are either even or not divisible by the product of a pair of twin primes. The goal of this paper is to give simple proofs of results on exponent patterns for an arbitrary shift $n$.