Multiple orthogonal polynomials associated with branched continued fractions for ratios of hypergeometric series

Abstract

The main objects of the investigation presented in this paper are branched-continued-fraction representations of ratios of contiguous hypergeometric series and type II multiple orthogonal polynomials on the step-line with respect to linear functionals or measures whose moments are ratios of products of Pochhammer symbols. This is an interesting case study of the recently found connection between multiple orthogonal polynomials and branched continued fractions that gives a clear example of how this connection leads to considerable advances on both topics.We start by obtaining new results about generating polynomials of lattice paths and total positivity of matrices and giving new contributions to the general theory of the connection between multiple orthogonal polynomials and branched continued fractions with emphasis on its application to the analysis of multiple orthogonal polynomials. Then, we construct new branched continued fractions for ratios of contiguous hypergeometric series. We give conditions for positivity of the coefficients of these branched continued fractions and we show that the ratios of products of Pochhammer symbols are generating polynomials of lattice paths for a special case of the branched continued fractions under study. Next, we introduce a family of type II multiple orthogonal polynomials on the step-line associated with those branched continued fractions. We present a formula as terminating hypergeometric series for these polynomials, we study their differential properties, and we find an explicit recurrence relation satisfied by them. Finally, we focus the analysis of the multiple orthogonal polynomials to the cases where the corresponding branched-continued-fraction coefficients are all positive. In those cases, the orthogonality conditions can be written using measures on the positive real line involving Meijer G-functions and we obtain results about the location of the zeros and the asymptotic behaviour of the polynomials.Specialisations of the multiple orthogonal polynomials studied here include the classical Laguerre, Jacobi, and Bessel orthogonal polynomials, multiple orthogonal polynomials with respect to Nikishin systems of two measures involving modified Bessel functions, confluent hypergeometric functions, and Gauss' hypergeometric function, and multiple orthogonal polynomials with respect to Meijer G-functions used to investigate the singular values of products of Ginibre random matrices as well as a r-orthogonal polynomial sequence with constant recurrence coefficients for any positive integer r and particular instances of the Jacobi-Piñeiro polynomials.