Arithmetic properties of coefficients of power series expansion of \(\prod _{n=0}^{\infty }\left( 1-x^{2^{n}}\right) ^{t}\) (with an appendix by Andrzej Schinzel) (Q681479)

The Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence \(\{T_n\}_{n\geq 0}\) is defined on the alphabet \(\varSigma = \{0,1\}\) by \(T_n=0\) if the sum of the binary digits of the integer \(n\) is even, and \(T_n=1\) if the sum of the binary digits of \(n\) is odd. This sequence was introduced by Thue in 1906 and rediscovered by Morse in 1921. However, it was already implicit in an \(1851\) paper of Prouhet. The Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence has many remarkable properties and found applications in combinatorics of words, analysis on manifolds, number theory and even physics. In this paper, the authors investigated the arithmetic properties of coefficients of the power series expansions of the function \[ F_t(x)=F(x)^t = \sum_{n=0}^\infty f_n(t) x^n, \] where \[ F(x)=\prod_{n=0}^\infty (1-x^{2^n}) = \sum_{n=0}^\infty (-1)^{T_n} x^n \] is the generating function of the Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence. Such a study does not have been previously considered. An interesting generalization of the well known expression concerning the \(2\)-adic valuation of the values of the binary partition function introduced by Euler is given in this context.