Monotonicity properties for ranks of overpartitions
The rank of partitions play an important role in the combinatorial interpretations of several Ramanujan's famous congruence formulas. In 2005 and 2008, the $D$-rank and $M_2$-rank of an overpartition were introduced by Lovejoy, respectively. Let $\overline{N}(m,n)$ and $\overline{N2}(m,n)$ denote the number of overpartitions of $n$ with $D$-rank $m$ and $M_2$-rank $m$, respectively. In 2014, Chan and Mao proposed a conjecture on monotonicity properties of $\overline{N}(m,n)$ and $\overline{N2}(m,n)$. In this paper, we prove the Chan-Mao monotonicity conjecture. To be specific, we show that for any integer $m$ and nonnegative integer $n$, $\overline{N2}(m,n)\leq \overline{N2}(m,n+1)$; and for $(m,n)\neq (0,4)$ with $n\neq\, |m| +2$, we have $\overline{N}(m,n)\leq \overline{N}(m,n+1)$. Furthermore, when $m$ increases, we prove that $\overline{N}(m,n)\geq \overline{N}(m+2,n)$ and $\overline{N2}(m,n)\geq \overline{N2}(m+2,n)$ for any $m,n\geq 0$, which is an analogue of Chan and Mao's result for partitions.