Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2022
We study the asymptotic behavior of the sequence $ \{\Omega (n) \}_{ n \in \mathbb {N} } $ from a dynamical point of view, where $ \Omega (n) $ denotes the number of prime factors of $ n $ counted with multiplicity. First, we show that for any non-atomic ergodic system $(X, \mathcal {B}, \mu , T)$, the operators $T^{\Omega (n)}: \mathcal {B} \to L^1(\mu )$ have the strong sweeping-out property. In particular, this implies that the pointwise ergodic theorem does not hold along $\Omega (n)$. Second, we show that the behaviors of $\Omega (n)$ captured by the prime number theorem and Erdős–Kac theorem are disjoint, in the sense that their dynamical correlations tend to zero.