A crank for bipartitions with designated summands (Q2054701)

This paper generalizes results of \textit{G. E. Andrews} and \textit{F. G. Garvan} [Bull. Am. Math. Soc., New Ser. 18, No. 2, 167--171 (1988; Zbl 0646.10008)], \textit{K. Q. Ji} and \textit{A. X. H. Zhao} [Ramanujan J. 44, No. 3, 631--640 (2017; Zbl 1432.11142)], and \textit{K. Q. Ji} and \textit{W. J. T. Zang} [Adv. Math. 393, Article ID 108053, 54 p. (2021; Zbl 1484.11200)], on crank of partitions to bipartitions with designated summands. Firstly, the authors introduce \(pd\)-crank for partitions, providing some inequalities for the \(pd\)-crank of bipartitions with designated summands modulo 2 and 3. More precisely, according to the authors, if \((\lambda_{1},\lambda_{2})\) is a partition with designated summands. Then, the \(pd\)-crank of \((\lambda_{1},\lambda_{2})\) denoted \(r_{bd}(x)\) is defined as \[ r_{bd}(\lambda)=l(\alpha_{1})-l(\alpha_{2}), \] where \(l(\alpha)\) is the number of parts of \(\alpha\), \(((\alpha_{1},\beta_{1}),(\alpha_{2},\beta_{2}))=(\Delta(\lambda_{1}),\Delta(\lambda_{2}))\), \(\Delta\) is a bijection between the set of partitions with designated summands and the set of vector partitions \((\alpha,\beta)\) with \(|\alpha|+|\beta|=n\), \(\alpha\) is an ordinary partition and \(\beta\) is a partition of \(n\) into parts \(\not\equiv\pm1\mod{6}\). The authors prove that, if \(M_{bd}(m,n)\) is the number of bipartitions of \(n\) with designated summands with \(pd\)-crank \(m\), and \(M_{bd}(k,t,n)\) denotes the number of bipartitions with designated summands of \(n\) with \(pd\)-crank congruent to \(k\) modulo \(t\). Then, the following inequalities hold \[ \begin{aligned} M_{bd}(0,2,2n)&>M_{bd}(1,2,2n),\\ M_{bd}(1,2,2n+1)&>M_{bd}(0,2,2n+1),\\ M_{bd}(0,3,6j+1)&\unlhd M_{bd}(1,3,6n+j),\quad 0\leq j\leq 5, \end{aligned} \tag{R} \] where \[ \unlhd= \begin{cases} <, & \text{if } j\in\{1,5\}, \\ >, & \text{if } j\in\{0,2,3\},\\ =, & \text{if } j=4.\end{cases} \] Inequalities (R) allow giving a combinatorial interpretation of the congruence \(PD_{-2}(6n+4)\equiv 0\mod{3}\) obtained previously by Naika and Shivashankar (\(PD(n)\) denotes the number of partitions of \(n\) with designated summands). In Section 3, the authors define the \(2k\)-th, \(pd\)-crank moments of bipartitions with designated summand weighted by the parity of \(pd\)-cranks \[ \mu_{2k,bd}(-1,n)=\underset{m=-\infty}{\overset{\infty}{\sum}}\binom{m+k-1}{2k}(-1)^{m}M_{bd}(m,n) \] as an analog of the \(2k\)-th crank moments \(\mu_{2k}(-1,n)\) introduced by Ji and Zhao [loc. cit.]. In this paper, it is proved the Theorem 6 which states that \[ (-1)^{n}\mu_{2k,bd}(-1,n)>0. \] The sequence \(\{M_{bd}(m,n)\}_{|m|\leq n}\) is unimodal for \(n\neq 1,5,7\) as a consequence of Theorem 7, which states that for \(m\geq 1\) and \(n\geq 0\), it holds that \(M_{bd}(m-1,n)\geq M_{bd}(m,n)\) except for \((m,n)\in\{(1,1),(1,5),(1,7)\}\).