Dyson's Rank, Overpartitions, and Weak Maass Forms

Abstract

In a series of papers the first author and Ono connected the rank, a partition statistic introduced by Dyson, to weak Maass forms, a new class of functions related to modular forms. Naturally it is of wide interest to find other explicit examples of Maass forms. Here we construct a new infinite family of such forms, arising from overpartitions. As applications we obtain combinatorial decompositions of Ramanujan-type congruences for overpartitions as well as the modularity of rank differences in certain arithmetic progressions.