Truncated theta series from the Bailey lattice

Abstract

In 2012, Andrews and Merca obtained a truncated version of Euler's pentagonal number theorem and showed the nonnegativity related to partition functions. Meanwhile, Andrews and Merca, Guo and Zeng independently conjectured that the truncated Jacobi triple product series has nonnegative coefficients, which has been confirmed analytically and also combinatorially. In 2022, Merca proposed a stronger version for this conjecture. In this paper, by applying Agarwal, Andrews and Bressoud's identity derived from the Bailey lattice, we obtain a truncated version for the Jacobi triple product series with odd basis, which reduces to the Andrews–Gordon identity as a special instance. As consequences, we obtain new truncated forms for Euler's pentagonal number theorem, Gauss' theta series on triangular numbers and square numbers, which lead to inequalities for certain partition functions. Moreover, by considering a truncated theta series involving ℓ-regular partitions, we confirm a conjecture proposed by Ballantine and Merca about 6-regular partitions and show that Merca's stronger conjecture on truncated Jacobi triple product series holds when $R=3S$ for $S\ge 1$.