The Hardy--Littlewood conjecture and rational points

Yonatan Harpaz, Alexei N. Skorobogatov, Olivier Wittenberg

Published 2013-04-11, updated 2014-03-19Version 3

Schinzel's Hypothesis (H) was used by Colliot-Th\'el\`ene and Sansuc, and later by Serre, Swinnerton-Dyer and others, to prove that the Brauer-Manin obstruction controls the Hasse principle and weak approximation on pencils of conics and similar varieties. We show that when the ground field is Q and the degenerate geometric fibres of the pencil are all defined over Q, one can use these methods to obtain unconditional results by replacing Hypothesis (H) with the finite complexity case of the generalised Hardy-Littlewood conjecture recently established by Green, Tao and Ziegler.