A class of completely monotonic functions involving the polygamma functions

Let $\Gamma (x)$ Γ ( x ) denote the classical Euler gamma function. We set $\psi _{n}(x)=(-1)^{n-1}\psi ^{(n)}(x)$ ψ n ( x ) = ( − 1 ) n − 1 ψ ( n ) ( x ) ($n\in \mathbb{N}$ n ∈ N ), where $\psi ^{(n)}(x)$ ψ ( n ) ( x ) denotes the nth derivative of the psi function $\psi (x)=\Gamma '(x)/\Gamma (x)$ ψ ( x ) = Γ ′ ( x ) / Γ ( x ) . For λ, α, $\beta \in \mathbb{R}$ β ∈ R and $m,n\in \mathbb{N}$ m , n ∈ N , we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the functions $$ L(x;\lambda ,\alpha ,\beta )=\psi _{m+n}(x)-\lambda \psi _{m}(x+ \alpha ) \psi _{n}(x+\beta ) $$ L ( x ; λ , α , β ) = ψ m + n ( x ) − λ ψ m ( x + α ) ψ n ( x + β ) and $-L(x;\lambda ,\alpha ,\beta )$ − L ( x ; λ , α , β ) to be completely monotonic on $(-\min (\alpha ,\beta ,0),\infty )$ ( − min ( α , β , 0 ) , ∞ ) .As a result, we generalize and refine some inequalities involving the polygamma functions and also give some inequalities in terms of the ratio of gamma functions.