Remarks on the conjectures of Capparelli, Meurman, Primc and Primc

Abstract In a series of two papers, S. Capparelli, A. Meurman, A. Primc, M. Primc (CMPP) and then M. Primc put forth three remarkable sets of conjectures, stating that the generating functions of coloured integer partitions in which the parts satisfy restrictions on the multiplicities admit simple infinite product forms. While CMPP related one set of conjectures to the principally specialised characters of standard modules for the affine Lie algebra $$\textrm{C}_n^{(1)}$$ C n ( 1 ) , finding a Lie-algebraic interpretation for the remaining two sets remained an open problem. In this paper, we use the work of Griffin, Ono and the fourth author on Rogers–Ramanujan identities for affine Lie algebras to solve this problem, relating the remaining two sets of conjectures to non-standard specialisations of standard modules for $$\textrm{A}_{2n}^{(2)}$$ A 2 n ( 2 ) and $$\textrm{D}_{n+1}^{(2)}$$ D n + 1 ( 2 ) . We also use their work to formulate conjectures for the bivariate generating function of one-parameter families of CMPP partitions in terms of Hall–Littlewood symmetric functions. We make a detailed study of several further aspects of CMPP partitions, obtaining (i) functional equations for bivariate generating functions which generalise the well-known Rogers–Selberg equations, (ii) a partial level-rank duality in the $$\textrm{A}_{2n}^{(2)}$$ A 2 n ( 2 ) case, and (iii) (conjectural) identities of the Rogers–Ramanujan type for $$\textrm{D}_3^{(2)}$$ D 3 ( 2 ) .