On sums of coefficients of polynomials related to the Borwein conjectures

Recently, Li (Int. J. Number Theory 2020) obtained an asymptotic formula for a certain partial sum involving coefficients for the polynomial in the First Borwein conjecture. As a consequence, he showed the positivity of this sum. His result was based on a sieving principle discovered by himself and Wan (Sci. China. Math. 2010). In fact, Li points out in his paper that his method can be generalized to prove an asymptotic formula for a general partial sum involving coefficients for any prime $p>3$. In this work, we extend Li's method to obtain asymptotic formula for several partial sums of coefficients of a very general polynomial. We find that in the special cases $p=3, 5$, the signs of these sums are consistent with the three famous Borwein conjectures. Similar sums have been studied earlier by Zaharescu (Ramanujan J. 2006) using a completely different method. We also improve on the error terms in the asymptotic formula for Li and Zaharescu. Using a recent result of Borwein (JNT 1993), we also obtain an asymptotic estimate for the maximum of the absolute value of these coefficients for primes $p=2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13$ and for $p>15$, we obtain a lower bound on the maximum absolute value of these coefficients for sufficiently large $n$.