Relations among Ramanujan-Type Congruences II

Abstract

We show that Ramanujan-type congruences are preserved by the action of the shallow Hecke algebra and provide several structure results for them. We discover a dichotomy between congruences originating in Hecke eigenvalues and congruences on arithmetic progressions with cube-free periods. The scarcity of the latter was investigated recently. We explain that they provide congruences among algebraic parts of twisted central $\mathrm{L}$-values. We specialize our results to partition congruences, for which we investigate the proofs of partition congruences by Atkin and by Ono, and develop a heuristic that suggests that their approach by Hecke operators acting diagonally modulo $\ell$ on modular forms is optimal. In an extended example, we showcase how to employ our conclusions to benefit experimental work.