1 Introduction
A partition of a positive integer n is a sequence of nonincreasing positive integers whose sum equals n. Let
$p(n)$
denote the number of partitions of n. Ramanujan found and proved the three famous congruences:



Dyson [Reference Dyson9] defined the rank of a partition to be the largest part minus the number of parts and conjectured that ranks of partitions provided combinatorial interpretations to Ramanujan’s congruences (1.1) and (1.2). Atkin and Swinnerton-Dyer [Reference Atkin and Swinnerton-Dyer3] proved these conjectures. Namely,


where
$N(m,k,n)$
denotes the number of partitions of n with rank congruent to m modulo k. They also obtained the generating functions for every rank difference
$N(b,\ell ,\ell n+d)-N(c,\ell ,\ell n+d)$
with
$\ell =5, 7$
and
$0\leq b,c,d\leq \ell $
.
Inspired by the works of Atkin and Swinnerton-Dyer, many authors studied properties of ranks of partitions. For equalities between
$N(t,k,n)$
and
$N(s,k,n)$
, see [Reference Andrews, Berndt, Chan, Kim and Malik1, Reference Fan, Xia and Zhao10, Reference Lewis12, Reference Santa-Gadea17]. For example, Andrews et. al. [Reference Andrews, Berndt, Chan, Kim and Malik1] found that

In [Reference Andrews and Lewis2], Andrews and Lewis made conjectures on inequalities between ranks of partitions modulo
$3$
. Bringmann [Reference Bringmann4] first proved these conjectures: for
$n \geq 0$
,

When
$n=1,3,7$
, we have equality in (1.4). Bringmann’s proof relies on the circle method to obtain asymptotic results on ranks of partitions modulo
$3$
. For more studies on the asymptotic behaviour of ranks of partitions, see [Reference Bringmann and Kane5, Reference Bringmann and Mahlburg6]. Later, Chan and the author provided refinements of these inequalities by using elementary q-series manipulation (see [Reference Chan and Mao7, Corollary 1.7]).
More recently, Chen et al. [Reference Chen, Chen and Garvan8] studied congruences for ranks of partitions. Let

They proved that, for all
$\alpha \geq 3$
and all
$n \geq 0$
,

where
$\delta _\alpha $
satisfies
$0<\delta _\alpha <5^\alpha $
and
$24 \delta _\alpha \equiv 1\ (\bmod\ 5^\alpha )$
. In this paper, we establish the following congruences.
Theorem 1.1. For integers
$\alpha \geq 0$
, let

Then,

Remark 1.2. From the proof of Proposition 3.1,

Thus,

We prove Theorem 1.1 by arguments similar to those in [Reference Mao and Zhou14, Reference Paule and Radu16, Reference Wang and Yang18]. We first establish some identities between modular functions on
$\Gamma _0(10)$
in Section 2. Then we prove Theorem 1.1 in Section 3.
2 Preliminaries
Recall the Dedekind eta-function given by

In the above equation and for the rest of this article, we use the notation

where
$q=e^{2\pi i\tau }$
with
$\text {Im}(\tau )>0$
. We also need

By the criteria for the modularity of eta-products [Reference Newman15, Theorem 4.7],
$\rho , t$
are modular functions on
$\Gamma _0(10)$
and
$M, K$
are on
$\Gamma _0(50)$
and
$\Gamma _0(25)$
, respectively.
For
$g(\tau ):=\sum _{n=-\infty }^{\infty } a_{g}(n) q^{n}$
, the operator
$U_{k}$
is defined by

One can easily verify that

We need the following fundamental lemma.
Lemma 2.1 (See [Reference Wang and Yang18, Lemma 2.3]).
Let

Then, for
$u: \mathbb {H} \rightarrow \mathbb {C}$
and
$j \in \mathbb {Z}$
,

Lemma 2.2. Let
$U^{(0,j)}(f):=U_5(K\cdot \rho ^j\cdot f), \ U^{(1,j)}(f):=U_5(M\cdot \rho ^j\cdot f)$
. Then we have four groups of identities.

Sketch of proof.
The equations in Groups I–IV are identities between modular functions on
$\Gamma _0(10)$
. One can automatically prove them by the MAPLE package ETA [Reference Garvan11]. For example, the Maple commands for verifying the second identity in Group II are provided at https://github.com/dongpanghu/code5.
We call a map
$d: \mathbb {Z} \times \mathbb {Z} \longrightarrow \mathbb {Z}$
a discrete array if for each i, the map
${d(i,-): \mathbb {Z} \longrightarrow \mathbb {Z}}$
given by
$j \mapsto d(i, j)$
has finite support.
Lemma 2.3. There exist discrete arrays
$a_{i,j}, b_{i,j}$
with
$0\leq i, j\leq 1$
such that for
$k\in \mathbb {Z}$
,

where

Moreover, the values of
$a_{i,j}(k, n)$
and
$b_{i,j}(k, n)$
for
$-4 \leq k\leq 0$
are given in Groups I–IV of Lemma 2.2 and, for other
$k, a_{i,j}(k, n), b_{i,j}(k, n)$
, satisfy the recurrence relation in [Reference Wang and Yang18, (2.17)]:

Proof. We verify that the result holds for
$-4 \leq k\leq 0$
by Groups I–IV in Lemma 2.2. Then we apply (2.1) to prove Lemma 2.3 by induction on k.
Denote the
$5$
-adic order of n by
$\pi (n)$
and set
$\pi (0)=+\infty $
.
Lemma 2.4 [Reference Wang and Yang18, Lemma 2.8].
Let
$g(k, n)$
be integers which satisfy the recurrence relation (2.3). Suppose there exists an integer l and a constant
$\gamma $
such that, for
$l \leq k \leq l+4$
,

Then (2.4) holds for any
$k \in \mathbb {Z}$
.
Lemma 2.5. Recall that
$a_{i, j}, b_{i, j}$
are given in Lemma 2.3. For
$n, k\in \mathbb {Z}$
,

3 Proof of Theorem 1.1
We first need the following generating function.
Proposition 3.1. We have

Proof. We deduce from [Reference Mao13, (1.14)] that

Note that

and

which together with (1.3) give

Define

Then Proposition 3.1 implies

Let
$ L_0:=1$
and, for
$\alpha \geq 1$
,

Lemma 3.2. For all
$\alpha \geq 0$
,


Proof. For any
$\alpha \geq 0$
,

Similarly,

Theorem 3.3. There exists discrete arrays
$c, d$
such that for
$\alpha \geq 1$
,

where

Moreover,

and

Proof. Let
$c(1,k)=0$
for
$k\geq 1$
and
$d(1,1)=5, d(1,k)=0$
for
$k\geq 2$
. For
$\alpha \geq 1$
, define

From Lemma 2.2, Group I and (3.5),

which gives
$\pi (c(1,n))\geq \lfloor {(5 n-2)}/{3}\rfloor $
and
$\pi (d(1,n))\geq \lfloor {5 n}/{3}\rfloor $
. From (3.6),

From Lemma 2.5,

Thus, the result holds for
$L_{\alpha }$
when
$\alpha =1, 2$
. We proceed by induction. Suppose that the result holds for
$L_{2\alpha }$
. Then, applying (2.2) and (3.5),

Moreover, using Lemma 2.5, (3.7) and (3.8), we find that

and

Next, we consider
$L_{2\alpha +2}$
. Using (2.2) and (3.6),

Then again by Lemma 2.5, (3.7) and (3.8),

and

Thus, the result holds for
$L_{2\alpha +2}$
. This proves Theorem 3.3 by induction.
Corollary 3.4. For
$\alpha \geq 1$
,

Note that (3.4) together with Corollary 3.4 implies (1.5). Thus, the proof of Theorem 1.1 is complete.