English

Power sum expansions for Kromatic symmetric functions using Lyndon heaps

Combinatorics 2025-10-30 v3

Abstract

In arXiv:2301.02177, Crew, Pechenik, and Spirkl defined the Kromatic symmetric function XG\overline{X}_G as a KK-analogue of Stanley's chromatic symmetric function XGX_G, and one question they asked was how XG\overline{X}_G expands in their pλ\overline{p}_\lambda basis, which they defined as a KK-analogue of the classic power sum basis pλ.p_\lambda. In arXiv:2408.01395, we gave a formula that partially answered this question but did not explain the combinatorial significance of the coefficients. Here, we give combinatorial descriptions for the p\overline{p}-coefficients of XG\overline{X}_G and ω(XG)\omega(\overline{X}_G), lifting the pp-expansion of XGX_G in terms of acyclic orientations that was given by Bernardi and Nadeau in arXiv:1904.01262. We also propose an alternative KK-analogue p\overline{p}' of the pp-basis that gives slightly cleaner expansion formulas. Our expansions are based on Lyndon heaps, introduced by Lalonde (1995), which are representatives for certain equivalence classes of acyclic orientations on clan graphs of GG. Additionally, we show that knowing XG\overline{X}_G is equivalent to knowing the multiset of independence polynomials of induced subgraphs of GG, which gives shorter proofs of all our results from arXiv:2403.15929 that XG\overline{X}_G can be used to determine the number of copies in GG of certain induced subgraphs. We also give power sum expansions for the Kromatic quasisymmetric function XG(q)\overline{X}_G(q) defined by Marberg in arXiv:2312.16474 in the case where GG is the incomparability graph of a unit interval order.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.21285,
  title  = {Power sum expansions for Kromatic symmetric functions using Lyndon heaps},
  author = {Laura Pierson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.21285},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

28 pages, comments welcome! v3: Edited to match journal version; main addition is Examples 2.1 and 2.2

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:02:15.051Z