On geometric properties of the generating function for the Ramanujan sequence

The Ramanujan sequence \(\{\theta _{n}\}_{n \ge 0}\), defined as \(\theta _{0}= {1}/{2}\), \({n^{n}} \theta _{n}/{n !} = {e^{n}}/{2} - \sum _{k=0}^{n-1} {n^{k}}/{k !}\, \), \(n \ge 1\), has been studied on many occasions and in many different contexts. Adell and Jodrá (Ramanujan J 16:1–5, 2008) and Koumandos (Ramanujan J 30:447–459, 2013) showed, respectively, that the sequences \(\{\theta _{n}\}_{n \ge 0}\) and \(\{4/135 - n \cdot (\theta _{n}- 1/3 )\}_{n \ge 0}\) are completely monotone. In the present paper, we establish that the sequence \(\{(n+1) (\theta _{n}- 1/3 )\}_{n \ge 0}\) is also completely monotone. Furthermore, we prove that the analytic function \((\theta _{1}- 1/3 )^{-1}\sum _{n=1}^{\infty } (\theta _{n}- 1/3 ) z^{n} / n^{\alpha }\) is universally starlike for every \(\alpha \ge 1\) in the slit domain \(\mathbb {C}\setminus 1,\infty )\). This seems to be the first result putting the Ramanujan sequence into the context of analytic univalent functions and is a step towards a previous stronger conjecture, proposed by Ruscheweyh et al. (Israel J Math 171:285–304, 2009), namely that the function \((\theta _{1}- 1/3 )^{-1}\sum _{n=1}^{\infty } (\theta _{n}- 1/3 ) z^{n} \) is universally convex.