1. Introduction and Definitions
The class of the functions
f analytic in
with the series expansion
will be denoted by
. Note that, for
, we have
. Next, let
be the class of functions
that are univalent in
.
Let
be the Carathéodory class, that is, the class of analytic functions of the form
with
.
Recall that
is said to be a starlike function if
, while a function
is called convex when
is starlike. We will use the standard notations
and
for the classes of starlike and convex functions, respectively. A function
is said to be a close-to-convex function if there exists a convex function
g and
such that
The class of all the close-to-convex functions will be denoted by
.
In 1985, de Branges [
1] published the proof of the famous conjecture, known since 1916 as the Bieberbach conjecture, which states that the coefficients of a function
with the Taylor series expansion (
1) satisfy the inequality
for every positive integer
n. The equality in (
3) holds only for the Koebe function
or for its rotations. The Bieberbach conjecture, extraordinary in its simplicity, turned out to be a difficult problem. For decades, it posed a formidable challenge to mathematicians, and work on this problem resulted in the discovery of many new, valuable methods and techniques in geometric function theory. Progressive published articles provided proofs of the Bieberbach conjecture for a fixed n or for important subclasses of the class
of univalent functions. More details on this topic can be found, for example, in [
2].
One of the topics that arose from the attempts to prove the Bieberbach conjecture was the problem of estimating the functional related to successive coefficients, that is,
, for the class
of univalent functions. The interest in this topic stemmed from the fact that the estimate
for
implies
. Let us recall several results in this direction. In 1963, Hayman [
3] proved that
holds in the class
, where
A is an absolute constant. Next, in 1978, Leung [
4] demonstrated the proof of the estimation
for
, which was conjectured by Pommerenke [
5]. The equality in this condition only holds for the function
for some
and
that satisfy
In 2017, Li and Sugawa [
6] obtained the following sharp upper estimate
for the class
of convex functions. Moreover, for
, they provided the sharp lower bounds
and
, respectively.
Another direction of research, resulting from the dependence
is related to the problem of estimating the modulus of the difference of successive coefficients in various subclasses of the class
. Let us quote here some results. In 1981, Robertson [
7] proved that if
, then the following inequality holds for each integer
:
In particular, for
or
, we obtain from (
4) the following:
In the abovementioned article [
6], Li and Sugawa considered the class
of convex functions with the second coefficient
fixed, and they proved that, for
with
, the following estimates hold:
and
The above results improve those given in (
5). In 2010, Brown [
8] proved the following estimation for the Carathéodory class
:
with equality for
, where
and
Quite recently, Zaprawa and Trąbka-Więcław [
9] researched the class of analytic functions defined by
with an additional condition
. Among other things they gave the following sharp estimates for this class:
and the estimates
which are sharp for
. More results on successive coefficients can be found in [
2] (pp. 113–115) (see also [
10,
11,
12,
13,
14]).
Motivated by these ideas and results, we will focus on the problem of maximizing selected coefficient functionals for certain classes of close-to-convex functions. Let us start with the definition.
For a given
, consider the subclass of
consisting of functions that satisfy
Condition (
6) can be rewritten in the following equivalent form:
where the function
is starlike for
. This family was introduced in [
15] and is denoted by
. Taking into account (
7), we can observe that
.
If
is fixed, then we obtain the known classes of analytic functions. For example, we can obtain
, where the symbol
stands for the class of bounded turning (see [
16] (p. 101), [
17]). For
, we obtain the class
defined by the condition
We found, in [
15], a sharp estimate of
for the functions of this class with the second coefficient fixed. If we put
in (
6), then
defines the class that was introduced and investigated by Zaprawa and Trąbka-Więcław in [
9]. In this paper, the authors found that this family of functions has an interesting symmetry property, that is, if
, then
also, and the images of
under these functions are symmetric with respect to the real axis.
Let us also mention the related family of functions
, for which, for some
, the following condition holds:
which was introduced by Lecko [
18] (see also [
19,
20,
21]).
Condition (
6), which defines the family
, gives a very useful correspondence between this class and the Carathéodory class, namely
or, equivalently, for each
, there exists a function
f in the class
such that
Then, for
f with Expansion (
1) and the
q of the form (
2), the following relationships hold among the coefficients of these functions:
It is well known that if
, then
. From this, using the equality
, it follows that
and, consequently,
or
.
In this paper, we were looking for the bounds of some coefficient functionals in
, partially with the additional assumption that
is fixed. In [
15], we introduced the subclass of
, denoted by
, which consists of functions whose second coefficient in series expansion is fixed as
and
. It should be noted that this family can be defined as follows:
Observe that if
, then
and
for the function
q connected to
f by Equality (
9). The second coefficient was fixed to obtain additional normalization for the function
f at the point
, that is, we fixed
. In this way, we reduced our considerations to a class of functions with fixed
,
, and
together.
3. Main Results
Let us recall that Equality (
8) gives several dependencies connecting the coefficients of the function
and the function
:
In particular cases, we obtain
It was shown in [
15] that (
17) results in
and
where
.
Consider the following functional, which is defined for
of Form (
1):
One can prove that [
15], for
and, for
For a fixed , the following sharp estimates of for were given.
Theorem 1 ([
15]).
If , , and if f has the form (1), then the following sharp inequality holds:where . The equality in (
23) holds for Function (
15) for case
. If
, then the equality in (
23) is achieved for Function (
16).
Moreover, the following estimates of for the class of bounded turning with the second coefficient fixed were provided.
Theorem 2 ([
15]).
If then the following inequalities hold:where is the only root of the polynomial in the interval . Remark 1. We will give here some supplementation to Theorem 2. Note that, for the function , which is given in (16) with we haveAfter analyzing the sign of the polynomial W in the interval , we find thatfor , where is determined in Theorem 2, while for , we have This shows the sharpness of Estimate (24) in the case when In this section, we continue the search for the estimates of for . In addition, we provide estimates of the functional and bounds of the n-th coefficient in both considered classes and .
Theorem 3. If , , , and if f has the form (1), then Proof. From (
21) or from (
18), we have
It follows from the known estimates for the class of Carathéodory functions that
. Moreover, using Lemma 2 with
, we obtain
Hence, returning to the estimation of
, we obtain, in the case when
, the following:
or, in the case when
, the following is obtained instead:
Thus, the proof is completed. □
We may generally establish the upper bound for and for even in the case when p is a complex number, but the result does not seem very good. This is because, in the proof, we apply the triangle inequality of type many times. But the equality holds for the case when only.
Theorem 4. If , , , and if f has the form (1), then Proof. Directly from (
21), we have
and, consequently, using known estimates of coefficients in the class
and Lemma 3, we obtain
which completes the proof. □
Theorem 5. If , , , and if f has the form (1), then Proof. From (
22), we have
Now, from the second inequality in Lemma 3, and from the known fact that
, we obtain
and the proof is completed. □
For
or
, Inequality (
26) gives
and
In general, it is hard to compare (
27), where
p is complex, with (
25), where
p is real. If, for example,
, then, from (
25), we have
, while (
27) gives
Then, we have
so, in this case, Estimation (
27) is better than (
25) when
.
If we consider
instead of
, then we can establish the upper bound even for the case where
p is a complex number. Before we present this result, we define the functional
and then recall a related result due to Zaprawa and Trąbka-Więcław, thereby giving estimates of
for
, which are only sharp for even
n and for all positive integers
n in the case when
Theorem 6 ([
9]).
If and , thenandFor each and even n, the equality holds for functionMoreover, for and all positive integers n, the equality holds for Now, we present an estimate of for an odd positive integer n and complex p, which is sharp for
Theorem 7. If , , , and if f has the form (1), then, for all , we have Proof. From (
19) and (
20), we have
where
are the coefficients of the function
, which satisfies (
9). Hence, using Lemma 2, we obtain
For
,
that is, for the function
, which is given in (
15) with
. □
In particular, for
, we have the following estimate:
and, for
, we obtain
Applying Theorem 7 with , we can derive the following corollary.
Corollary 1. If , , then, for all , we haveThe equality occurs for the function given in (30). Remark 2. Putting in (31) gives the sharp result for the class , which coincides with that given in Theorem 6 for n odd and . This shows that the result (28) is also sharp for . In the following theorems, we provide sharp estimates of the th coefficient for .
Theorem 8. If , , and if f has the form (1), thenandThe bounds (32) and (33) are sharp. Proof. From (
19), we have that the even coefficients
satisfy
because
. This proves (
32). For the odd coefficients
, from (
20), we have
As such, we obtain (
33). Now, we will try to establish some functions
that show the sharpness of the bounds (
32) and (
33). From (
9), it is known that, if
, then there exists
such that
Then, from (
19) and (
20), the coefficients of
, where
is described in (
34), satisfy
and
This shows that Estimations (
32) and (
33) are sharp in the case when
.
Note that the
defined in (
34) is of the form
Observe that the coefficients of
are not strictly decreasing. If
, then the above function
reduces to
If
and
m is odd, then, from (
19), we have
If in the above equality, we apply the odd coefficients
of the Carathéodory’s function
then, from (
34), we can obtain a suitable function
whose even coefficients
satisfy
This shows that equality occurs in (
32) when
m is odd. If
and
m is even, then, from (
19), we have
If, in the above equality, we apply the even coefficients
of the Carathéodory’s function (
35), then
This shows that we obtain the equality in (
32) when
m is even. To show the sharpness of (
33), one must first consider
and an odd
m. Then, from (
20), we have
If, in the above equality, we apply the even coefficients
of the Carathéodory’s function
then we obtain
This shows that we obtain the equality in (
33) when
m is odd. If
, and
m is even, then, from (
20), we have
If, in the above equality, we apply the even coefficients
of the (
36), then
This shows that we obtain the equality in (
33) when
m is even. □
If we consider class with a fixed real , then Theorem 8 becomes the following result.
Theorem 9. If , , , and if f has the form (1), thenand Proof. From (
19), we have
which gives (
37). For the odd coefficients
, we apply (
20), to have
This gives (
38). □
An open problem is whether the bounds in (
37) and (
38) are sharp. The extremal functions that were applied in the proof of Theorem 8 are not in the class
for all
because, in each case of these functions, the second coefficient
is not in
.