English

Hermite-Jensen limits and $d$ log-concavity of $q$-multinomials

Number Theory 2026-04-21 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

In 1878, Sylvester proved Cayley's Conjecture that the coefficients of the Gaussian qq-binomial coefficients are unimodal. In 1990, O'Hara famously discovered a constructive combinatorial proof, and in 2013, Pak and Panova proved the stronger property of strict unimodality for sufficiently large parameters. We move from unimodality to log-concavity and higher degree d d log-concavity, known as Tur\'an inequalities. Although qq-binomial coefficients are not always log- or degree dd log-concave, it's natural to ask to what extent these inequalities hold. In infinite families with limiting aspect ratio bounded away from zero and one, we prove that these stronger inequalities hold uniformly, for each C>0,C>0, on the central window mμ<Cσ,|m-\mu|< C\sigma, where μ\mu and σ\sigma are the mean and standard deviation of the normalized distribution. More generally, we obtain the same conclusions for qq-multinomial coefficients. These results stem from the asymptotic behavior of normalized Jensen polynomials, which are approximated by Hermite polynomials.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.02628,
  title  = {Hermite-Jensen limits and $d$ log-concavity of $q$-multinomials},
  author = {Ken Ono},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.02628},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

This version addresses minor comments suggested by two anonymous referees. The most significant change is the addition of a new paragraph which describes Petrov's method for Edgeworth expansions which is used in the paper. This paragraph offers friendly exposition for readers unfamiliar with the method