Congruences of multipartition functions modulo powers of primes

Let p _r (n) denote the number of r-component multipartitions of n, and let S _γ,λ be the space spanned by η(24z) ^γ ?(24z), where η(z) is the Dedekind’s eta function and ?(z) is a holomorphic modular form in \(M_{\lambda}(\mathrm{SL}_{2}(\mathbb{Z}))\) . In this paper, we show that the generating function of \(p_{r}(\frac{m^{k} n +r}{24})\) with respect to n is congruent to a function in the space S _γ,λ modulo m ^k . As special cases, this relation leads to many well known congruences including the Ramanujan congruences of p(n) modulo 5,7,11 and Gandhi’s congruences of p ₂(n) modulo 5 and p ₈(n) modulo 11. Furthermore, using the invariance property of S _γ,λ under the Hecke operator \(T_{\ell^{2}}\) , we obtain two classes of congruences pertaining to the m ^k -adic property of p _r (n).