On Primitivity and Vanishing of Dirichlet Series

Abstract

For a rational valued periodic function, we associate a Dirichlet series and provide a new necessary and sufficient condition for the vanishing of this Dirichlet series specialized at positive integers. This question was initiated by Chowla and carried out by Okada for a particular infinite sum. Our approach relies on the decomposition of the Dirichlet characters in terms of primitive characters. Using this, we find some new family of natural numbers for which a conjecture of Erdős holds. We also characterize rational valued periodic functions for which the associated Dirichlet series vanishes at two different positive integers under some additional conditions.