English

When is the chromatic quasisymmetric function symmetric?

Combinatorics 2025-08-04 v2

Abstract

We investigate the problem of when a chromatic quasisymmetric function (CQF) XG(x;q)X_G(x;q) of a graph GG is in fact symmetric. We first prove the remarkable fact that if a product of two quasisymmetric functions ff and gg in countably infinitely many variables is symmetric, then in fact ff and gg must be symmetric. This allows the problem to be reduced to the case of connected graphs. We then show that any labeled graph having more than one source or sink has a nonsymmetric CQF. As a corollary, we find that all trees other than a directed path have a nonsymmetric CQF. We also show that a family of graphs we call ''mixed mountain graphs'' always have symmetric CQF.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.10556,
  title  = {When is the chromatic quasisymmetric function symmetric?},
  author = {Maria Gillespie and Joseph Pappe and Kyle Salois},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.10556},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Corrected typos, added references

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:34:48.093Z