An asymptotic property on a reciprocity law for the Bettin--Conrey cotangent sum

Abstract

In 2013 Bettin and Conrey have introduced a cotangent sum $c \colon \mathbb{Q}_{>0}\to \mathbb{R}$, which can be regarded as a variant of the Dedekind sum. They have discovered that the cotangent sum satisfies a kind of reciprocity laws. Roughly speaking, the reciprocity law for $c(x)$ means that there is a relation between $c(x)$ and $c(1/x)$ modulo holomorphic functions. Furthermore they have investigated Taylor coefficients $g_n$ of the implicit holomorphic function, which appears in the reciprocity law for $c(x)$, at $x=1$. As a result, they have obtained an asymptotic formula for $g_n$ as $n\to\infty$. In this paper we improve it to an asymptotic series expansion. This resolves a conjecture by Zagier. A new ingredient of this paper is to use the confluent hypergeometric function of the second kind.