Bounded Gaps Between Primes in Chebotarev Sets

A new and exciting breakthrough due to Maynard establishes that there exist infinitely many pairs of distinct primes $p_1,p_2$ with $|p_1-p_2|\leq 600$ as a consequence of the Bombieri-Vinogradov Theorem. In this paper, we apply his general method to the setting of Chebotarev sets of primes. We study applications of these bounded gaps with an emphasis on ranks of prime quadratic twists of elliptic curves over $\mathbb{Q}$, congruence properties of the Fourier coefficients of normalized Hecke eigenforms, and representations of primes by binary quadratic forms.Comment: 15 pages. Referee comments implemented. Research in the Mathematical Sciences 2014, 1:

Levels of Distribution and the Affine Sieve

This article is an expanded version of the author's lecture in the Basic Notions Seminar at Harvard, September 2013. Our goal is a brief and introductory exposition of aspects of two topics in sieve theory which have received attention recently: (1) the spectacular work of Yitang Zhang, under the title "Level of Distribution," and (2) the so-called "Affine Sieve," introduced by Bourgain-Gamburd-Sarnak.Comment: 34 pages, 2 figure

Expanding graphs, Ramanujan graphs, and 1-factor perturbations

We construct (k+-1)-regular graphs which provide sequences of expanders by adding or substracting appropriate 1-factors from given sequences of k-regular graphs. We compute numerical examples in a few cases for which the given sequences are from the work of Lubotzky, Phillips, and Sarnak (with k-1 the order of a finite field). If k+1 = 7, our construction results in a sequence of 7-regular expanders with all spectral gaps at least about 1.52