Convergence properties of the classical and generalized Rogers-Ramanujan continued fraction

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the convergence and divergence of the Rogers-Ramanujan and the generalized Rogers-Ramanujan continued fractions on the unit circle. We provide an example of an uncountable set of measure zero on which the Rogers-Ramanujan continued fraction $R(x)$ diverges and which enlarges a set previously found by Bowman and Mc Laughlin. We further study the generalized Rogers-Ramanujan continued fractions $R_a(x)$ for roots of unity $a$ and give explicit convergence and divergence conditions. As such, we extend some work of Huang towards a question originally investigated by Ramanujan and some work of Schur on the convergence of $R(x)$ at roots of unity. In the end, we state several conjectures and possible directions for generalizing Schur's result to all Rogers-Ramanujan continued fractions $R_a(x)$.