Supercongruences involving Motzkin numbers and central trinomial coefficients

TL;DR

This paper proves three supercongruences involving Motzkin numbers and central trinomial coefficients, confirming conjectures posed by Z.-W. Sun over a decade ago, using modular arithmetic techniques.

Contribution

The paper establishes new supercongruences for sums involving Motzkin numbers and trinomial coefficients, confirming longstanding conjectures.

Findings

Proved supercongruences modulo p^2 for sums of Motzkin numbers.

Confirmed conjectures of Z.-W. Sun from 12 years ago.

Derived explicit congruences involving Legendre symbols.

Abstract

Let $M_n$ and $T_n$ denote the $n$th Motzkin number and the $n$th central trinomial coefficient respectively. We prove that for any prime $p\ge 5$, \begin{align*} &\sum_{k=0}^{p-1}M_k^2\equiv \left(\frac{p}{3}\right)\left(2-6p\right)\pmod{p^2},\\ &\sum_{k=0}^{p-1}kM_k^2\equiv \left(\frac{p}{3}\right)\left(9p-1\right)\pmod{p^2},\\ &\sum_{k=0}^{p-1}T_kM_k\equiv \frac{4}{3}\left(\frac{p}{3}\right)+\frac{p}{6}\left(1-9\left(\frac{p}{3}\right)\right)\pmod{p^2}, \end{align*} where $\left(-\right)$ is the Legendre symbol. These results confirm three 12-year-old supercongruence conjectures of Z.-W. Sun.