On the $p$-adic properties of Stirling numbers of the first kind

Abstract: Let $n, k$ and $a$ be positive integers. The Stirling numbers of the first kind, denoted by $s(n,k)$, count the number of permutations of $n$ elements with $k$ disjoint cycles. Let $p$ be a prime. In recent years, Lengyel, Komatsu and Young, Leonetti and Sanna, Adelberg, Hong and Qiu made some progress in the study of the $p$-adic valuations of $s(n,k)$. In this paper, by using Washington's congruence on the generalized harmonic number and the $n$-th Bernoulli number $B_n$ and the properties of $m$-th Stirling numbers of the first kind obtained recently by the authors, we arrive at an exact expression or a lower bound of $v_p(s(ap, k))$ with $a$ and $k$ being integers such that $1\le a\le p-1$ and $1\le k\le ap$. This infers that for any regular prime $p\ge 7$ and for arbitrary integers $a$ and $k$ with $5\le a\le p-1$ and $a-2\le k\le ap-1$, one has $v_p(H(ap-1,k))<-\frac{\log{(ap-1)}}{2\log p}$ with $H(ap-1, k)$ being the $k$-th elementary symmetric function of $1, \frac{1}{2}, ..., \frac{1}{ap-1}$. This gives a partial support to a conjecture of Leonetti and Sanna raised in 2017. We also present results on $v_p(s(ap^n,ap^n-k))$ from which one can derive that under certain condition, for any prime $p\ge 5$, any odd number $k\ge 3$ and any sufficiently large integer $n$, if $(a,p)=1$, then $v_p(s(ap^{n+1},ap^{n+1}-))=v_p(s(ap^n,ap^n-k))+2$. It confirms partially Lengyel's conjecture proposed in 2015.