Fractional partitions and conjectures of Chern–Fu–Tang and Heim–Neuhauser

Many papers have studied inequalities for partition functions. Recently, a number of papers have considered mixtures between additive and multiplicative behavior in such inequalities. In particular, Chern-Fu-Tang and Heim-Neuhauser gave conjectures on inequalities for coefficients of powers of the generating partition function. These conjectures were posed in the context of colored partitions and the Nekrasov-Okounkov formula. Here, we study the precise size of differences of products of two such coefficients. This allows us to prove the Chern-Fu-Tang conjecture and to show the Heim-Neuhauser conjecture in a certain range. The explicit error terms provided will also be useful in the future study of partition inequalities. These are laid out in a user-friendly way for the researcher in combinatorics interested in such analytic questions.