Power sum expansions for Kromatic symmetric functions using Lyndon heaps
Abstract
In arXiv:2301.02177, Crew, Pechenik, and Spirkl defined the Kromatic symmetric function as a -analogue of Stanley's chromatic symmetric function , and one question they asked was how expands in their basis, which they defined as a -analogue of the classic power sum basis 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 -coefficients of and , lifting the -expansion of in terms of acyclic orientations that was given by Bernardi and Nadeau in arXiv:1904.01262. We also propose an alternative -analogue of the -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 . Additionally, we show that knowing is equivalent to knowing the multiset of independence polynomials of induced subgraphs of , which gives shorter proofs of all our results from arXiv:2403.15929 that can be used to determine the number of copies in of certain induced subgraphs. We also give power sum expansions for the Kromatic quasisymmetric function defined by Marberg in arXiv:2312.16474 in the case where 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