No Arabic abstract
In this paper we shall survey the various methods of evaluating Hankel determinants and as an illustration we evaluate some Hankel determinants of a q-analogue of Catalan numbers. Here we consider $frac{(aq;q)_{n}}{(abq^{2};q)_{n}}$ as a q-analogue of Catalan numbers $C_{n}=frac1{n+1}binom{2n}{n}$, which is known as the moments of the little q-Jacobi polynomials. We also give several proofs of this q-analogue, in which we use lattice paths, the orthogonal polynomials, or the basic hypergeometric series. We also consider a q-analogue of Schroder Hankel determinants, and give a new proof of Moztkin Hankel determinants using an addition formula for ${}_2F_{1}$.
Motivated by the Hankel determinant evaluation of moment sequences, we study a kind of Pfaffian analogue evaluation. We prove an LU-decomposition analogue for skew-symmetric matrices, called Pfaffian decomposition. We then apply this formula to evaluate Pfaffians related to some moment sequences of classical orthogonal polynomials. In particular we obtain a product formula for a kind of q-Catalan Pfaffians. We also establish a connection between our Pfaffian formulas and certain weighted enumeration of shifted reverse plane partitions.
The Euler numbers occur in the Taylor expansion of $tan(x)+sec(x)$. Since Stieltjes, continued fractions and Hankel determinants of the even Euler numbers, on the one hand, of the odd Euler numbers, on the other hand, have been widely studied separately. However, no Hankel determinants of the (mixed) Euler numbers have been obtained and explicitly calculated. The reason for that is that some Hankel determinants of the Euler numbers are null. This implies that the Jacobi continued fraction of the Euler numbers does not exist. In the present paper, this obstacle is bypassed by using the Hankel continued fraction, instead of the $J$-fraction. Consequently, an explicit formula for the Hankel determinants of the Euler numbers is being derived, as well as a full list of Hankel continued fractions and Hankel determinants involving Euler numbers. Finally, a new $q$-analog of the Euler numbers $E_n(q)$ based on our continued fraction is proposed. We obtain an explicit formula for $E_n(-1)$ and prove a conjecture by R. J. Mathar on these numbers.
Sulanke and Xin developed a continued fraction method that applies to evaluate Hankel determinants corresponding to quadratic generating functions. We use their method to give short proofs of Ciglers Hankel determinant conjectures, which were proved recently by Chang-Hu-Zhang using direct determinant computation. We find that shifted periodic continued fractions arise in our computation. We also discover and prove some new nice Hankel determinants relating to lattice paths with step set ${(1,1),(q,0), (ell-1,-1)}$ for integer parameters $m,q,ell$. Again shifted periodic continued fractions appear.
We prove evaluations of Hankel determinants of linear combinations of moments of orthogonal polynomials (or, equivalently, of generating functions for Motzkin paths), thus generalising known results for Catalan numbers.
A polynomial $A(q)=sum_{i=0}^n a_iq^i$ is said to be unimodal if $a_0le a_1le cdots le a_kge a_{k+1} ge cdots ge a_n$. We investigate the unimodality of rational $q$-Catalan polynomials, which is defined to be $C_{m,n}(q)= frac{1}{[n+m]} left[ m+n atop nright]$ for a coprime pair of positive integers $(m,n)$. We conjecture that they are unimodal with respect to parity, or equivalently, $(1+q)C_{m+n}(q)$ is unimodal. By using generating functions and the constant term method, we verify our conjecture for $mle 5$ in a straightforward way.