1 Introduction
The objective of this paper is to derive an asymptotic formula for the crank of overpartitions, and subsequently utilize this formula to demonstrate several inequalities of crank function. A partition of a positive integer n is understood to be a sequence of non-decreasing positive integers that sum to n. The function
$p(n)$
represents the total number of partitions of n. In exploring a combinatorial explanation for the three notable congruences of
$p(n)$
discovered by Ramanujan, Dyson [Reference Dyson13] proposed the notion of the rank of a partition. This rank is determined by the discrepancy between the difference between the largest part and the number of parts. Dyson conjectured that the rank of a partition could explain the congruences for
$p(5n+4)$
and
$p(7n+5)$
, but not for
$p(11n+6)$
, which was confirmed by Atkin and Swinnerton–Dyer [Reference Atkin and Swinnerton-Der3]. Furthermore, Dyson hypothesized the existence of another statistic, specifically the crank, which he proposed could illuminate all of Ramanujan’s congruences. This crank concept was subsequently brought to fruition by Andrews and Garvan [Reference Andrews and Garvan2, Reference Garvan14], where the crank of a partition
$\lambda $
, is defined as the largest part of
$\lambda $
if there are no ones in the partition; otherwise, it is defined as the number of parts larger than the number of ones minus the number of ones.
Since their inception, the ranks and cranks of partitions have become subjects of extensive study, with particular focus on their asymptotic behavior and differences in rank or crank. Let
$N(a, c, n)$
(resp.
$M(a,c,n)$
) denote the number of partitions of n with rank (resp. crank) congruent to a modulo c. Bringmann [Reference Bringmann5] utilized the Hardy–Ramanujan circle method to derive an asymptotic formula for
$N(a, c, n)$
. Expanding on this foundation, Bringmann and Kane [Reference Bringmann and Kane8] proceeded to establish an inequality for
$N(a, c, n)$
. Moreover, Rolon [Reference Zapata Rolon18] demonstrated analogous asymptotics and inequalities for
$M(a,c,n)$
.
As expected, this prompted further study of the rank and crank for other types of restricted partitions. With the definition of overpartitions, the concepts of rank [Reference Lovejoy17] and crank [Reference Bringmann, Lovejoy and Osburn7] were straightforwardly extended to these. Recall that an overpartition [Reference Corteel and Lovejoy11] of a nonnegative integer n is a partition of n, but with the addition that the first occurrence of each distinct part may be overlined, and
$\overline {p}(n)$
represents the total number of overpartitions of n. Many mathematicians have contributed to understanding the asymptotics [Reference Bringmann and Lovejoy6, Reference Ciolan9] and inequalities [Reference Ciolan10, Reference Cui, Gu and Su12, Reference Jennings-Shaffer15, Reference Ji, Zhang and Zhao16] related to the rank of overpartitions.
Analogous to the crank of an ordinary partition, Bringmann, Lovejoy, and Osburn [Reference Bringmann, Lovejoy and Osburn7] proposed the concept of the first residual crank for an overpartition. The first residual crank of an overpartition is defined as the crank of the subpartition formed by the non-overlined parts. For instance, consider the overpartition
$\lambda =(\bar {9},9,7,\bar {6},5,5,\bar {4},4,3,\bar {1},1,1)$
. The subpartition composed of its non-overlined parts is
$(9,7,5,5,4,3,1,1)$
. Consequently, the first residual crank of
$\lambda $
is determined to be
$4$
.
Before we state one of main results of this paper, we recall certain facts about Dedekind sums. If
$x \in \mathbb {R}$
, then let

For coprime integers h and k, let
$s(h, k)$
be the usual Dedekind sum

In terms of these sums, we define
$\omega _{h, k}$
by

For coprime integers h and k, with
$k>0$
, we let
$h'$
denote a choice of an inverse of
$-h$
modulo k, that is,
$h'$
is a solution to
$hh'\equiv -1\pmod {k}$
. Furthermore, consider
$0 < a < c$
as coprime integers with
$c\geq 3$
being odd. Let
$k_1:=\frac {k}{(k,c)},~c_1:=\frac {c}{(k,c)}$
and
$0<l<c_1$
be defined by the congruence
$l\equiv ak_1~(\text {mod}~c_1)$
. Lastly, for
$m,n\in \mathbb {Z}$
and
$c|k$
, we proceed to define the following sum of Kloosterman type

where the sum runs over all primitive residue classes h modulo k. For the case
$c\nmid k$
, we introduce another Kloosterman-type sum as follows:

Moreover, we define

and

Let
$\overline {M}(m,n)$
denote the number of overpartitions of n with the first residual crank equal to m. Bringmann, Lovejoy, and Osburn [Reference Bringmann, Lovejoy and Osburn7] obtained the generating function of
$\overline {M}(m,n)$
, that is,

In particular,

If
$0<a<c$
are coprime integers, c is odd and n is a positive integer, we define

Using the circle method, we obtain the following asymptotic formulas for the coefficient
$\overline {A}\left (\frac {a}{c};n\right )$
.
Theorem 1.1 If
$0<a<c$
are coprime integers,
$c\geq 3$
is odd and n is a positive integer, then the following holds:

where

Employing Theorem 1.1, a straightforward analysis leads us to the ensuing corollary.
Corollary 1.2 Let
$0\leq a<c$
with c an odd integer. For any positive integer n, we have

where
$c':=\frac {c}{(c,j)}$
,
$j':=\frac {j}{(c,j)}$
and

Remark While the bounds on the error terms in Theorem 1.1 and Corollary 1.2 appear identical, they fundamentally differ. Consequently, we employ distinct notations to denote them.
Corollary 1.2 offers an asymptotic expression for
$\overline {M}(a,c,n)$
along with an error term
$O(n^\varepsilon )$
.
Theorem 1.3 Let
$0\leq a<c$
with c an odd integer. Then we have

where

Subsequently, we further refine this analysis by establishing an equality relationship between
$\overline{M}(a,c,n)$
and
$\overline p(n)$
. In addition, we provide explicit bounds for the associated error term.
As a direct application of Theorem 1.1, we further establish the inequality of crank differences.
Theorem 1.4 Suppose that
$0\leq a<b\leq \frac {c-1}{2}$
and that
$c\geq 9$
is an odd integer. For
$n>\overline {N}_{a,b,c}$
, where
$\overline {N}_{a,b,c}$
is an explicit constant, we have the inequality:

We employ Theorem 1.3 to demonstrate the positivity of
$\overline {M}(a,c,n)$
.
Theorem 1.5 Let
$0\leq a<c$
with c an odd integer. For
$c\geq 9$
, define the constant

Then we have

if
$c<9$
and
$n\geq 196$
, or if
$c\geq 9$
and
$n> \max\{840c, \overline {Q}_c\}$
.
Bessenrodt and Ono [Reference Bessenrodt and Ono4] were the first to discover the strict log-subadditivity property of the partition function
$p(n)$
. Subsequently, numerous studies emerged investigating the strict log-subadditivity property of other partition functions. The final result of this paper is to demonstrate the strict log-subadditivity property of
$\overline {M}(a,c,n)$
.
Theorem 1.6 Let
$0\leq a<c$
with c an odd integer. We have

if
$c<9$
and
$n_1,n_2\geq 196$
, or if
$c\geq 9$
and
$n_1,n_2\geq \overline {Q}_c$
, where
$\overline {Q}_c$
is defined in (1.4).
The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we introduce a transformation formula for
$\overline {C}(x;q)$
. Section 3 is dedicated to breaking down the coefficient
$\overline {A}\left (\frac {a}{c};n\right )$
into four terms and providing explicit expressions for the main terms and establishing bounds for the error terms within each component. This allows us to establish Theorem 1.1. Moving on to Section 4, we leverage Theorem 1.1 to prove Corollary 1.2 and Theorem 1.3. Finally, in Section 5, we apply the derived results to demonstrate various inequalities pertaining to the crank function, covering crank differences, positivity, and strict log-subadditivity.
2 A transformation law
In this section, we establish a transformation formula for the function
$\overline {C}(x;q)$
, which plays an important role in the proof of the asymptotics of crank of overpartitions. First, we introduce the needed quantities to state the transformation rules. The Dedekind
$\eta $
-function is defined as

and the Jacobi
$\vartheta $
-function is defined as

For convenience, we let

and

where
$h,k$
are coprime integer with
$h'$
like previous section. In principle, one can make any choice of
$h'$
, but must carry that specific choice through all relevant calculations. To allow simplifications in various formulas and calculations, we make some assumptions about our choice of
$h'$
. These assumptions deal only with fixed k and h and only appear in the proofs. When
$2\nmid k$
, we assume that
$h^{\prime }_2=\frac {h'}{2}$
. These are viewed as choices made for a fixed value of k and h, so such a choice is possible. Clearly such choices would be impossible for all k and h simultaneously.
For
$z\in \mathbb {C}$
with
$Re(z)>0$
, we have

where we take the principal branch of the square root and

Moreover,
$\eta $
is a modular form of weight
$\frac {1}{2}$
with multiplier system.
Define
$x=e^{2\pi i\omega }$
and
$q=e^{2\pi i\tau }$
, where
$\omega \in \mathbb {C}$
and
$\tau \in \mathbb {H}$
. Then,
$\vartheta $
satisfies the Jacobi triple product identity

and if
$\mathrm {Re}(z)>0$
, then

Plugging (2.1) and (2.4) in (1.1), we obtain that

We are now ready to show the transformation law of
$\overline {C}\left (e^{2\pi i\omega _1};e^{2\pi i\tau _1}\right )$
.
Proposition 2.1 Adopting the previously mentioned notation and further, let
$w \in \mathbb {C}$
with
$\operatorname {Re}(z)>0$
. Define
$q:=e^{2\pi i\tau _1}=e^{\frac {2 \pi i}{k}(h+i z)}$
and
$q_1:=e^{2\pi i\tau _2}=e^{\frac {2 \pi i}{k}\left (h^{\prime }+\frac {i}{z}\right )}$
.
(1) If
$c|k$
and k is even, we have

(2) If
$c|k$
and k is odd, we have

(3) If
$c\nmid k$
and k is even, we have

(4) If
$c\nmid k$
and k is odd, we have

where

Proof Substituting
$\omega $
and
$\tau $
by
$\omega _1$
and
$\tau _1$
in (2.6), respectively, we find that

By plugging (2.5) and (2.3) into (2.11), we infer that

For k is even, since
$(h,k)=1$
, we have
$\left (h,\frac {k}{2}\right )=1$
. From (2.2) it follows that

Inserting (2.3) into (2.13), we arrive at

Thus for k is even, (2.12) equals to

We now assume that
$c|k$
. It is obvious that
$\frac {ak}{c}\in \mathbb {Z}$
. Rewriting
$\eta \left (\tau _2\right )\eta \left (2\tau _2\right )$
by (2.6), we obtain

Recall the following identity in Rolon [Reference Zapata Rolon18]:

Then (2.15) becomes

which coincides with (2.7).
The case
$c\nmid k$
presents more complexity, as typically
$\frac {ak}{c}\not \in \mathbb {Z}$
. Given that l was determined as the solution to the congruence
$l\equiv ak_1\pmod {c_1}$
by definition, it follows that
$B=\frac {l-ak_1}{c_1}\in \mathbb {Z}$
. This allows for the adjustment of the theta function in the elliptic variable by a factor of B times the modular variable, as defined previously.
Recall the following identity in Rolon [Reference Zapata Rolon18]:

Combining with (2.14), we get

We define
$x=e^{2\pi i\omega _3}$
, and use the exponential representation of the sine to deduce

Thus, (2.9) can be given by inserting this expression into (2.18).
For k is odd, then we have
$(2h,k)=1$
, by (2.2),

Using (2.3), we infer that

Thus for k is odd, (2.12) equals to

Similarly, we consider the cases
$c|k$
and
$c\nmid k$
. For
$c|k$
, we have
$\frac {ak}{c}$
is an integer, and we obtain

Utilizing (2.16), (2.21) can be rewritten as

which yields (2.8).
It remains to prove (2.10). Combining (2.17) and (2.19) with (2.20), we see that

This completes the proof.
3 Asymptotics for
$\overline {A}\left (\frac {a}{c};n\right )$
In this section, we establish the asymptotic formula for
$\overline {A}\left (\frac {a}{c};n\right )$
by decomposing it into the sum of
$\Sigma _1$
,
$\Sigma _2$
,
$\Sigma _3$
, and
$\Sigma _4$
, and then assessing the error and principal terms for each component. Key to our analysis are the following lemmas.
Lemma 3.1 Let
$n,m,k,D\in \mathbb {Z}$
with
$(D,k)=1$
,
$0\leq \sigma _1<\sigma _2\leq k.$
Then there are constants
$\tilde {C}_1$
and
$\tilde {C}_2$
, which are independent of a and k, such that:
(1) We have

(2) We have

Proof The proof of equation 3.1 is essentially established in [Reference Andrews1], with only a slight modification required. Part two is a direct consequence of part one and the proof of Lemma 3.2 in [Reference Bringmann5].
Lemma 3.2 Define the integral
$I_{k,t}$
as follows:

We then evaluate this integral to obtain:

where the error term
$I_{k,t}^{err}$
is given by

Proof Substituting
$z=\frac {k}{n}-ik\Phi $
into (3.3) gives

We now define
$\Gamma $
as the circle passing through
$\frac {k}{n}\pm \frac {i}{N}$
and tangent to the imaginary axis at
$0$
. For
$z=x+iy$
,
$\Gamma $
is characterized by
$x^2+y^2=\alpha x$
, where
$\alpha =\frac {k}{n}+\frac {n}{N^2k}$
. Considering that
$2>\alpha >\frac {1}{k}$
,
$\mathrm {Re}(z)\leq \frac {k}{n}$
and
$\mathrm {Re}\left (\frac {1}{z}\right )< k$
on the smaller arc, similar to the argument of Rolon [Reference Zapata Rolon18, Eq. (4.6)], we get that the integral over the smaller arc is:

Furthermore, Cauchy’s theorem allows us to modify the path of integration in (3.6) to follow the larger arc of
$\Gamma $
. Transforming the circle to a straight line by
$s=\frac {2\pi t}{kz}$
gives:

where
$\gamma \in \mathbb {R}$
and
$\beta =\frac {4\pi ^2 tn}{k^2}$
. Using the Hankel integral formula in [Reference Watson19], we compute

We thus get (3.4). This completes the proof.
Lemma 3.3 If
$0<a<c$
are coprime integers,
$c\geq 3$
is odd and n is a positive integer, then

Proof By Cauchy’s theorem we have for
$n>0$

where
$\mathcal {C}$
denotes any path within the unit circle that encircles the origin in a counterclockwise direction. Opting for a circular path of radius
$e^{-\frac {2\pi }{n}}$
and parameterizing it as
$q=e^{-\frac {2\pi }{n}+2\pi it}$
for
$0\leq t\leq 1$
yields

We define

where
$\frac {h_1}{\widetilde {k}_1}<\frac {h}{k}<\frac {h_2}{\widetilde {k}_2}$
are adjacent Farey fractions in the Farey sequence of order
$N=\lfloor n^{1/2}\rfloor $
. We know that

Now we decompose the path of integration along Farey arcs
$-\vartheta ^{\prime }_{h,k}\leq \Phi \leq \vartheta ^{\prime \prime }_{h,k}$
, where
$\Phi =t-\frac {h}{k}$
and
$0\leq h<k\leq N$
with
$(h,k)=1$
. From this decomposition of the path we can rewrite the integral along these arcs:

where
$z=\frac {k}{n}-k\Phi i$
. We incorporate our transformation formula into the integral and conclude the proof.
By utilizing the estimates for the sums
$\Sigma _1$
,
$\Sigma _2$
,
$\Sigma _3$
, and
$\Sigma _4$
, we substantiate the proof of Theorem 1.1, wherein
$\Sigma _1$
and
$\Sigma _3$
correspond to the error terms, while
$\Sigma _2$
and
$\Sigma _4$
pertain to the main terms. Subsequently, we will provide an in-depth analysis, presenting detailed calculations for the main terms as well as establishing bounds for the error terms.
For convenience, we define

where c is an odd integer.
Lemma 3.4
$\Sigma _1$
contributes to an error term, with its definition provided in (3.7). Moreover, the bound for
$\Sigma _1$
is as follows:

Proof We note that

Let

then we have

where
$m_{r,s}$
takes values in
$\mathbb {Z}$
. Consequently,
$\Sigma _1$
can be expressed as follows:

where


We first consider
$\widehat {S}_1$
. Splitting the integration path into

and denoting the associated sums by
$\widehat {S}_{11},\widehat {S}_{12}$
, and
$\widehat {S}_{13}$
, then one can demonstrate that
$\widehat {S}_{1i}$
$(i=1,2,3)$
contributes to the error term. Specifically, for
$\widehat {S}_{11}$
, we find

According to (3.2) and the facts that

we deduce that

where
$C_1, C_2, C_3$
and
$C_4$
are constants.
Turning our attention to
$\widehat {S}_{12}$
, the integral within this term can be reformulated as:

Plugging into
$\widehat {S}_{12}$
gives:

Given the constraint
$\widetilde {k}_1\leq N$
, it follows that
$\ell \leq \widetilde {k}_1+k-1\leq N+k-1$
, thereby limiting the range of summation over h. Consequently, we can estimate
$\widehat {S}_{12}$
by summing over more integrals:

Now by the theory of Farey fractions we have

for
$i=1,2$
. This means the restriction of
$h'$
to one or two intervals in the range
$0\leq h' < k$
. Similar to
$\widehat {S}_{11}$
, using (3.2) and (3.13), we get
$\widehat {S}_{12}= O(n^\varepsilon )$
. The shape of
$\widehat {S}_{13}$
is the same as that of
$\widehat {S}_{12}$
. Hence, representing the expression as

yields
$\widehat {S}_{13}= O(n^\varepsilon )$
by the same argument.
Following this, our analysis shifts to
$\widehat {S}_{2}$
. Analogously, the integral within
$\widehat {S}_{2}$
can be expressed as

and we denote the associated sums by
$\widehat {S}_{21},\widehat {S}_{22}$
and
$\widehat {S}_{23}$
. Then taking the absolute value of this it is possible to bound the term. Before doing that we define

where
$\overline {a}(r)$
are exactly
$\overline {p}(n)$
except from some constant term ambiguity. Using (3.2) and (3.13) again, we have

Since
$\widehat {S}_{22}$
and
$\widehat {S}_{23}$
are treated in exactly the same way as
$\widehat {S}_{12}$
, by writting

and repeating the steps of the estimation of
$\widehat {S}_{12}$
, we derive that both
$\widehat {S}_{22}$
and
$\widehat {S}_{23}$
are of order
$O(n^\varepsilon )$
. In conclusion, we have

For the bounds of
$\Sigma _1$
, using (3.13) and
$\vartheta _{h,k}'+\vartheta" _{h,k}\leq \frac 2{k\sqrt {n}}$
, we have

Here we use a change of variables
$ah'\rightarrow h$
. Applying (3.9) and
$\mathrm {Re}\left (\frac 1z\right )>\frac k2$
, we have

Recall the estimate in [Reference Ciolan10, Section 4.2]:

Using these inequalities above and setting
$\epsilon _1=\sum _{r=1}^\infty \overline {p}(r)e^{-\pi r}$
, we can derive that

This completes the proof.
In the above proof of
$\Sigma _1$
, we detailed how to identify the error terms and compute their bounds. In the subsequent proof of
$\Sigma _4$
, we will focus on determining the main term and calculating the bounds of the error terms, while omitting the process of identifying these error terms.
Lemma 3.5
$\Sigma _4$
contributes a main term, defined as in (3.7), which can be specifically expressed as follows:

Moreover, the error terms coming from
$\Sigma _4$
can be bounded by

where

Proof Note that

Then the product in
$\Sigma _4$
can be written as

We aim to demonstrate that
$m^{\prime }_{r,s}\in \mathbb {Z}$
and
$r^{\prime }_0$
may be negative. The segments involving negative r contribute to the component. Considering
$\tau _2=\frac {h'+iz^{-1}}{k}$
,
$q_1=e^{2\pi i\tau _2}$
, we further elaborate (3.19) by employing

inside of
$\eta \left (\frac {h'+iz^{-1}}{2k}\right )\eta ^{-1}\left (\frac {2(h'+iz^{-1})}{k}\right ) \overline {C}\left (ah',\frac {lc}{c_1},c;q_1\right )$
. So, the main contribution of

comes from the following expression:

From this is possible to split the expression into the roots of unity and to the part that depends on the variable z. The roots of unity look like:

Rewriting the expression in the second bracket, using the congruence condition
$l\equiv ak_1\pmod {c_1}$
,
$l^2+l$
is always even and rearranging the sum it is possible to show that the contribution of the roots of unity looks like
$\exp \left (\frac {2\pi ih'm^{\prime }_{r,s}}{k}\right )$
where
$m^{\prime }_{r,s}$
is a sequence in
$\mathbb {Z}$
. The interesting part happens for
$\exp \left (\frac {\pi }{kz}H_2\right )$
, where
$H_2$
is defined in the following way:

This part contributes to the circle method exactly if
$H_2>0$
. A straightforward, but rather tedious computation shows that there are two contributions coming from each of the two terms of

The first one comes from the first sum, if
$m=0$
, and this contributes with

where
$\delta ^{+}_{a,c,k,r}=\frac {l^2}{2c_1^2}+\frac {1}{16}-\left (r+\frac {1}{2}\right )\frac {l}{c_1}$
. The second contribution comes from the second sum, if
$m=1$
, and this contributes with

where
$\delta ^{-}_{a,c,k,r}=\frac {l^2}{2c_1^2}-\frac {15}{16}-r\left (1-\frac {l}{c_1}\right )+\frac {l}{2c_1}$
. Thus,
$\Sigma _4$
can be rewritten as

Now it is possible to rewrite the sum over k into the sum where the k’s have the same values for
$c_1$
and l and thus the
$\delta _{a,c,k,r}^i$
are constant in each class and the condition
$\delta _{a,c,k,r}^i>0$
is independent of k in each class. Moreover it is clear that there are only finitely many solution to the inequality
$\delta _{a,c,k,r}^i>0$
. This means it is possible to split the sum over r into positive and negative
$\delta _{a,c,k,r}^i$
, where the part with positive
$\delta _{a,c,k,r}^i$
contributes to the main term. Therefore, using (3.1) it is possible to evaluate
$\Sigma _4$
by the same argument as for
$\Sigma _1$
:

Then substituting (3.4) into (3.23), we obtain (3.17).
Now we give a specific bound for the error coming from
$\Sigma _4$
, which is composed of three parts. Firstly, we consider the error corresponding to the terms where
$\delta _{a,c,k,r}^i$
is not positive, denoting it by
$S_4^{err}$
. Define
$\overline {M}(jh',l,c; q_1)$
to be the terms with positive exponents in the
$q_1$
-expansion of

where
$\tau _2=\frac {h'+iz^{-1}}{k}$
. Then using the usual change of variable
$ah'\rightarrow h$
, we find


We bound the contributions of
$\overline {M}$
term by term beginning with the first one. We find that

Then we gain the following contribution to
$\overline {M}$

where
$r_0:=\lceil \frac {l}{2c_1}+\frac {c_1}{16l}-\frac 12\rceil $
and
$r\geq r_0$
is a solution of
$\delta _{a,c,k,r}^+<0$
. Using

and the usual geometric series we can bound the term further by

For
$0<l<c_1$
, one can easily verify that
$\delta _{j,c,k,r}^{i}<\delta _{j,c,k,0}^{+}=\frac 12(\frac l{c_1}-\frac 12)^2-\frac 1{16}$
. Assuming
$\frac {l}{c_1}<\frac {1}{2}$
, which we may do by the symmetry of the parabola in the argument
$\frac l{c_1}$
, we see that
$\delta _{j,c,k,0}^{+}$
arrives the maximum value
$\delta =\frac 1{2{c_1}^2}-\frac 1{2c_1}+\frac 1{16}$
at
$l=1$
. Since
$\delta \leq \delta _0$
, we have
$\delta _{j,c,k,r}^{i}\leq \delta _0$
. Therefore, we can bound the second term by the same way. In the third and fourth summand all the terms will contribute to the error as shown in Theorem 1.1. We obtain

Proceeding by repeating this step for the fourth sum in the expansion of
$\frac {\eta \left (\frac {\tau _2}2\right )}{\eta \left (2\tau _2\right )}\overline {C}\left (h,\frac {lc}{c_1},c;q_1\right )$
, we can get a bound for
$\overline {M}$

Based on the above estimates, we find that
$\overline {M}$
can be bounded by the function
$f(c)$
that just depends on c. Therefore the error can be bounded by

Here it used that the sum over h can be bounded trivially by k because the sum runs over the residue class modulo k and we estimated the sum over k by an integral expression.
As a next step we want to bound the second part error that comes from symmetrizing the integral, which is the associated sums of the last two integrals in (3.12), that is

Completely analogous to
$\Sigma _1$
, it is possible to show

As we can bound the term with
$i=-$
and
$i=+$
in a same way, we restrict to the case
$i=+$
. The sum over r gives

Here we have used that the summation over r is an error term if it starts with
$r_0$
, so here we have to sum over all the r-terms where
$r\leq r_0-1$
.
The last error we have to bound comes from the evaluation of the integral. There it is used that it is possible to change the path of integration if one accounts the integral over the smaller arc. This term has to be made explicit. Applying (3.5), and estimation of the sum over k, we bound the third part error by

Summing up (3.24), (3.25), and (3.26), we obtain the bound of the error coming from
$\Sigma _4$
. This completes the proof.
In the computation of
$\Sigma _2$
, which also contributes a main term, the calculation process differs slightly from that of
$\Sigma _4$
. Therefore, we will detail the differences and omit the similar parts in the calculations.
Lemma 3.6
$\Sigma _2$
gives rise to the main term, as defined in (3.7), which can be expressed specifically as follows:

where the error term
$O(n^{\varepsilon })$
coming from
$\Sigma _2$
can be bounded by

Proof Using (3.9), we obtain

where
$\tau _2=\frac {h'+iz^{-1}}{k}$
,
$q_1=e^{2\pi i\tau _2}$
and

Setting
$\frac {(q_1^{1/2};q_1^{1/2})_\infty }{(q_1^2;q_1^2)_\infty }:=1+\sum _{n=1}^\infty b(n)q_1^{n/2}$
in (3.29), we obtain that

Consequently,
$\Sigma _2$
can be expressed as follows:

where

Using (3.2), it is possible to demonstrate that
$\widetilde {S}_1$
contributes to the main term and
$\widetilde {S}_2=O(n^\varepsilon )$
, that is

Then by (3.4), we obtain (3.27).
We next estimate the error coming from
$\widetilde {S}_1$
, which consists of two parts: the error arises from integrating over the remaining parts of the interval and the error coming from integrating along a smaller arc. Using (3.5), (3.16) and
$k\leq \sqrt {n}$
, we can bound the error coming from integrating along a smaller arc:

Utilizing (3.16) again, the error arises from integrating over the remaining parts of the interval can be bounded by

We now give a bound for
$\widetilde {S}_2$
. Applying (3.31), we deduce that

Here we also use the change of variables
$ah'\rightarrow h$
. Utilizing the triangle inequality and
$|q_1|<1$
, we get that

Combining this with the identity

and (3.30), we can infer that

Applying (3.16), we have

Summing up (3.32), (3.33), and (3.34) gives (3.28). This completes the proof.
The proof for
$\Sigma _3$
is very similar to that for
$\Sigma _1$
, so we have omitted the detailed calculations.
Lemma 3.7
$\Sigma _3$
leads to an error term, as defined in (3.7). Additionally, the upper bound for
$\Sigma _3$
is as follows:

Proof By (3.18), it is easy to see that

where
$m_{r,s}\in \mathbb {Z}$
. By the same argument as for
$\Sigma _4$
, we can find that the there is no part contributing to the main term, resulting in

Now we consider the bound of
$\Sigma _3$
. Similar to the proof for
$\Sigma _1$
, we have

Combining (3.18), we have

Since

we have

This completes the proof.
Given the established estimates for
$\Sigma _1$
,
$\Sigma _2$
,
$\Sigma _3$
, and
$\Sigma _4$
, the proof of Theorem 1.1 follows readily.
Proof of Theorem 1.1
In light of Lemmas 3.3–3.7, we derive the asymptotic formula for
$\overline {A}\left (\frac {a}{c};n\right )$
, including an initial estimation of the error term. Given that this initial error bound is overly broad and lacks precision, we proceed to provide a more detailed and specific error bound.
We first give the estimates of constants
$\epsilon _1$
,
$\epsilon _2$
and
$\epsilon _3$
in (3.8). Using the fact that for
$n\geq 1$
,

we have

It can be easily verify by derivation that,

Hence, we also can compute that

Similarly,
$\epsilon _3<\pi c+0.0001$
. Moveover, we have the following inequality [Reference Zhang and Zhong20, Eq. (3.13)]

In view of Lemma 3.4 and (3.37), we have

Similarly, by Lemma 3.7, we have

By Lemma 3.6 and (3.37), we obtain the bound of the error arising from
$\Sigma _2$
:

Recall that

Hence, in view of Lemma 3.5 and (3.36), we can bound the error arising from
$\Sigma _4$
by

Summing up (3.38), (3.39), (3.40), and (3.41) yields

This completes the proof.
4 Asymptotic formula for
$\overline {M}(a,c,n)$
In this section, we will employ Theorem 1.1 to derive the asymptotic formula for
$\overline {M}(a,c,n)$
, as indicated by Corollary 1.2. Following that, we will proceed to estimate the error term of
$\overline {M}(a,c,n)$
, enabling us to establish a more precise asymptotic formula, as presented in Theorem 1.3.
Proof of Corollary 1.2
By the orthogonality of roots of unity, we obtain

Recall the following asymptotic formula for
$\overline {p}(n)$
in [Reference Zuckerman21]:

By substituting Theorem 1.1 and (4.2) into (4.1), the proof is concluded.
Our next objective is to give an asymptotic formula of
$\overline {M}(a,c,n)$
with an effective bound. By Corollary 1.2 and (4.2), we obtain

We denote the second and third summand as
$\overline G_1$
and
$\overline G_2$
, respectively. To complete the proof of Theorem 1.3, we require the bounds for
$\overline G_1$
and
$\overline G_2$
.
Lemma 4.1 Let c be an odd integer and n be a positive integer. We have

and

Proof With the fact that
$|\exp (\pi i x)|=1$
for
$x\in \mathbb {R}$
, letting
$jh'\rightarrow h$
in the summation of sine, we have

Using the estimate (3.16), we obtain that

Here it is used that following estimation of the sum:


We next turn to
$\overline G_2$
. Recall that
$\delta _{j,c,k,r}^i\leq \delta _0$
. Combining
$|\overline {D}_{j,c,k}(-n,m_{j,c,k,r}^i)|\leq k$
, we have

Noting that the number of r satisfying
$\delta _{j,c,k,r}^i>0$
is less than
$\frac {c}{16}$
, we have

Moreover, one can see that

Substituting (4.7) and (4.8) into (4.6), we can obtain (4.4). This completes the proof.
Now we are in a position of proving Theorem 1.3.
Proof of Theorem 1.3
From [Reference Zhang and Zhong20, Theorem 6], we get the following lower bound for
$\overline p(n)$
, that is, for
$n\geq 1$
,

Combining with (1.2), (4.3), (4.9), and Lemma 4.1, for odd c and positive integer n, we have

Since for
$n\geq 2$
,

which yields that

We take the sum of all three coefficients, the highest order exponential, and the highest power of n from the three terms and put them together in one term. Note that
$4\sqrt {\delta _0}>\frac 13$
for
$c\geq 9$
. Therefore, we get the bounds of
$\overline R(a,c,n)$
, which completes the proof.
5 Inequalities of
$\overline {M}(a,c,n)$
In this section, utilizing the asymptotic formulas obtained earlier, we establish several inequality relationships concerning
$\overline {M}(a,c,n)$
, including crank differences, positivity, and strict log-subadditivity. First, we will utilize Theorem 1.1 to prove Theorem 1.4.
Proof of Theorem 1.4
By (4.1) we have

where

We use Theorem 1.1, with a change of variables that does not effect the theorem. If
$c\nmid k$
, we redefine
$0<l<c$
to be the unique solution to the congruence
$l\equiv jk$
(mod c). Inserting Theorem 1.1 into (5.1), we obtain

where

Then, we need to find the main term in
$\overline {M}(a,c,n)-\overline {M}(b,c,n)$
.
The main term:
Firstly, we detect the main contribution coming from sinh. In
$\overline {S}_j$
, the main term occurs for
$k=c$
, giving
$\sinh \left (\frac {\pi \sqrt {n}}{c}\right )$
as the main hyperbolic sine argument, whereas in
$\overline {T}_j^i$
it is given by
$k=1$
. Recall that
$\delta _{j,c,k,r}^{i}<\delta _{j,c,k,0}^{+}$
and
$\delta _{j,c,k,0}^{+}$
arrives the maximum value
$\delta _0=\frac 1{2{c}^2}-\frac 1{2c}+\frac 1{16}$
at
$l=1$
. Moreover,
$l\equiv jk$
(mod c) together with
$k=l=1$
gives that
$j=l=1$
. These imply that the largest argument occurs for
$k=1, r=0$
and
$j=1$
. For
$k=1, r=0,$
and any j, we easily see that
$\overline {D}_{j,c,1}(-n,m_{j,c,1,0}^+)=\overline {D}_{j,c,1}(-n,0)=1$
. Now, since

for
$c\geq 9$
, the main term is

and this is positive for all
$0\leq a<b\leq \frac {c-1}2$
. Therefore, for sufficiently large n, we obtain
$\overline M(a,c,n)>\overline M(b,c,n)$
. The following step entails providing a clear definition of “sufficiently large” by establishing bounds for the remaining terms.
Bounding contribution of
$\overline {S}_j$
:
Since
$|\rho _j(a,b,c)|<2$
, by (4.5), we have

Next we want to bound the
$\overline {T}_j^i$
for
$j\geq 2$
and
$\overline {T}_1^-$
.
Bounding the contribution of
$\overline {T}_j^i$
for
$j\geq 2$
:
For
$k\geq 2$
, we trivially bound

Since
$\sinh (x)=(e^x-e^{-x})/2$
, we have

Next, recall that the number of r satisfying
$\delta _{j,c,k,r}^i>0$
is less than
$\frac {c}{16}$
. Thus we can bound
$\overline {T}_j^i$
for
$k\geq 2$
by the following expression:

Since
$\delta _{j,c,1,0}^i<\delta _0$
for
$j\geq 2$
, we bound the
$k=1$
contribution by the argument

Before coming to the error terms of the circle method we have to bound the contribution of
$\overline {T}_1^-$
.
Bounding the contribution of
$\overline {T}_1^-$
:
By the same analysis, it is possible to bound this term by a similar expression as the ones before. By bounding the sinh by the exponential function, using
$|\rho _j(a,b,c)|<2$
and showing
$\delta _{1,c,k,r}^-$
is smaller than
$\delta _{2,c,1,0}^+$
and so choosing the right argument in the exponential function,
$\overline {T}_1^-$
can be bounded by

The explicit constant:
Denoting the four different error terms in Lemmas 3.4–3.7,
$\overline {S}_j$
,
$\overline {T}_j^i$
for
$j\geq 2$
and
$\overline {T}_1^-$
by
$\Sigma _{err,m}$
we can conclude that

This finishes the proof.
For
$c<9$
, the
$S_j$
will give the main contributions to the circle method as noticed in the last theorem. As the sign of
$S_j$
depend on the sign of
$\bar {B}_{j,c,k}$
and the
$\bar {B}_{j,c,k}$
oscillate we will have the following.
Corollary 5.1 For sufficiently large n, we obtain the following inequalities.
-
(1) The crank differences
$\overline {M}(a, 3,3 n+d)-\overline {M}(b, 3,3 n+d)$ are
$$\begin{align*}\begin{cases}<0, \quad & \text { if }(a, b, d) \in\{(0, 1, 1),(0,1,2)\}, \\>0, \quad & \text { if }(a, b, d) \in\{(0,1,0)\}. \end{cases} \end{align*}$$
-
(2) The crank differences
$\overline {M}(a, 5,5 n+d)-\overline {M}(b, 5,5 n+d)$ are
$$\begin{align*}\begin{cases}<0, \quad &\text { if }(a, b, d) \in\{(0, 2, 4),(0,1,2),(0,1,4), (0, b,b),(1,2,0),(1,2,3)\}, \\>0, \quad & \text { if }(a, b, d) \in\{(0,b,0),(1, 2, 1), (0,1,3)\} .\end{cases} \end{align*}$$
-
(3) The crank differences
$\overline {M}(a, 7,7 n+d)-\overline {M}(b, 7,7 n+d) $ are
$$\begin{align*}\begin{cases}<0, \quad & \text { if }(a, b, d) \in\{(0, b, 4),(0,1,1),(0, 1,2), (0,2,2),(1,2,0),\\ & \quad (1,2,5),(2,3,6)\}, \\ >0, \quad & \text { if }(a, b, d) \in\{(0,b,0),(0, b, 3), (0,1,5),(0,2,6),(0,3,5),(1,2,1),\\ &\quad (1,2,4),(1,2,6),(1,3,1),(1,3,2),(1,3,4),(2,3,0),(2,3,2),(2,3,5)\} .\end{cases} \end{align*}$$
Proof For c being an odd integer less than
$9$
, these inequalities can be readily verified using mathematical software. Specifically, for cases where
$c < 7$
and
$k = c$
, this setting results in the largest argument for the hyperbolic sine function in
$\overline {S}j$
. Consequently, it is sufficient to determine the sign of
$\sum _j \rho _j(a, b, c) \overline {B}{j, c, c}(-n, 0)$
to identify which inequality the crank differences satisfy. For the case where
$c=7$
, the arguments of the hyperbolic sines in
$\overline {S}_j$
and
$\overline {T}_1^+$
may align and potentially cancel each other out. Therefore, we compute the sum of
$\sum _j i\rho _j(a, b, c) \overline {B}_{j, c, c}(-n, 0)/\sqrt {7}$
and
$ 2\rho _1(a, b, c)\sin {\frac {\pi }{7}}$
to determine which inequality is met by the crank differences.
Therefore, using Theorem 1.3, we can establish Theorem 1.5.
Proof of Theorem 1.5
In light of (1.3), to prove
$\overline M(a,c,n)>0$
, it is sufficient to prove

if
$c<9$
and
$n\geq 196$
, and

if
$c\geq 9$
and
$n>\overline {Q}_c$
, where
$\overline {Q}_c$
is defined in (1.4). According to the bound of
$\overline R(a,c,n)$
in Theorem 1.3, we just need to show for
$c<9$

and for
$c\geq 9$

In order to verify (5.3), it suffices to prove that

which holds for
$n\geq 196$
. We next deal with the case of
$c\geq 9$
. To prove (5.4), it is equivalent to prove that

Since for
$x\geq 104$
,

and for
$c\geq 9$
,

we have

In view of (5.5) and (5.6), it is sufficient to verify

which holds for
$n\geq \overline Q_c$
. This completes the proof.
We use the bound of
$\overline R(a,c,n)$
to prove Theorem 1.6 now.
Proof of Theorem 1.6
We first consider the case
$c<9$
. By Theorem 1.3, we can give a lower and an upper bound for
$\overline M(a,c,n)$
, that is,

where

For
$3\leq c<9$
, we have

Noting that
$n^{\frac {11}{8}}e^{-\frac {2\pi }{3}\sqrt {n}}$
is decreasing for
$n\geq 196$
, it follows that

Similarly, we get

Hence, when
$3\leq c<9$
and
$n\geq 196$
, we have

From [Reference Zhang and Zhong20, Theorem 6], we know that for
$n\geq 1$
,

For
$c<9$
, let
$n_1=\lambda n_2$
with
$\lambda \geq 1$
. Then by (5.7) and (5.8), we have

and

for
$n\geq 196$
. Hence it suffices to show that

where

On the one hand, it can be shown that
$T_{n_2}(\lambda )$
is increasing and
$S_{n_2}(\lambda )$
is decreasing for
$\lambda \geq 1$
. On the other hand,

So it is sufficient to verify that

which holds for
$n_2\geq 107$
.
Finally, we deal with the case
$c\geq 9$
. In this case, we bound
$ \overline M(a,c,n)$
by a different way. Applying (1.3) and (5.2), we obtain that

for
$n\geq \overline Q_c$
. By the same argument of the case
$c<9$
, it suffices to show that

where

It is obvious that

So it is equivalent to verify that

On the one hand, when
$n_2\geq 2$
, we get

On the other hand, when
$n_2>840c$
, we have

Therefore, in light of (5.9), (5.10), and (5.11), we know (1.5) holds for
$c\geq 9$
and
$n_1,n_2\geq \overline Q_c$
.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the referee for valuable suggestions.