Non-existence of Ramanujan congruences in modular forms of level four

Abstract

Ramanujan famously found congruences for the partition function like p(5n+4) = 0 modulo 5. We provide a method to find all simple congruences of this type in the coefficients of the inverse of a modular form on Gamma_{1}(4) which is non-vanishing on the upper half plane. This is applied to answer open questions about the (non)-existence of congruences in the generating functions for overpartitions, crank differences, and 2-colored F-partitions.