Overpartitions and Bressoud's conjecture, I

Abstract

In 1980, Bressoud conjectured a combinatorial identity $A_j=B_j$ for $j=0$ or $1$, where the function $A_j$ counts the number of partitions with certain congruence conditions and the function $B_j$ counts the number of partitions with certain difference conditions. Bressoud's conjecture specializes to a wide variety of well-known theorems in the theory of partitions. Special cases of his conjecture have been subsequently proved by Bressoud, Andrews, Kim and Yee. Recently, Kim resolved Bressoud's conjecture for the case $j=1$. In this paper, we introduce a new partition function $\bar{B}_j$ which can be viewed as an overpartition analogue of the partition function $B_j$ introduced by Bressoud. By means of Gordon markings, we build bijections to obtain a relationship between $\bar{B}_1$ and $B_0$ and a relationship between $\bar{B}_0$ and $B_1$. Based on these former relationships, we further give overpartition analogues of many classical partition theorems including Euler's partition theorem, the Rogers-Ramanujan-Gordon identities, the Bressoud-Rogers-Ramanujan identities, the Andrews-G\"ollnitz-Gordon identities and the Bressoud-G\"ollnitz-Gordon identities.