Lemke Oliver and Soundararajan bias for consecutive sums of two squares

In a surprising recent work, Lemke Oliver and Soundararajan noticed how experimental data exhibits erratic distributions for consecutive pairs of primes in arithmetic progressions, and proposed a heuristic model based on the Hardy–Littlewood conjectures containing a large secondary term, which fits the data very well. In this paper, we study consecutive pairs of sums of squares in arithmetic progressions, and develop a similar heuristic model based on the Hardy–Littlewood conjecture for sums of squares, which also explains the biases in the experimental data. In the process, we prove several results related to averages of the Hardy–Littlewood constant in the context of sums of two squares.