Shift-Plethystic Trees and Rogers-Ramanujan Identitites

Abstract

By studying non-commutative series in an infinite alphabet we introduce shift-plethystic trees and a class of integer compositions as new combinatorial models for the Rogers-Ramanujan identities. We prove that the language associated to shift-plethystic trees can be expressed as a non-commutative generalization of the Rogers-Ramanujan continued fraction. By specializing the noncommutative series to $q$-series we obtain new combinatorial interpretations to the Rogers-Ramanujan identities in terms of signed integer compositions. We introduce the operation of shift-plethysm on non-commutative series and use this to obtain interesting enumerative identities involving compositions and partitions related to Rogers-Ramanujan identities.