Jumping champions and gaps between consecutive primes

Abstract

The most common difference that occurs among the consecutive primes less than or equal to $x$ is called a jumping champion. Occasionally there are ties. Therefore there can be more than one jumping champion for a given $x$. In 1999 A. Odlyzko, M. Rubinstein, and M. Wolf provided heuristic and empirical evidence in support of the conjecture that the numbers greater than 1 that are jumping champions are 4 and the primorials 2, 6, 30, 210, 2310,... As a step towards proving this conjecture they introduced a second weaker conjecture that any fixed prime $p$ divides all sufficiently large jumping champions. In this paper we extend a method of P. Erdős and E. G. Straus from 1980 to prove that the second conjecture follows directly from the prime pair conjecture of G. H. Hardy and J. E. Littlewood.

7 pages, 1 table