Power sum expansion of chromatic quasisymmetric functions

The chromatic quasisymmetric function of a graph was introduced by Shareshian and Wachs as a refinement of Stanley's chromatic symmetric function. An explicit combinatorial formula, conjectured by Shareshian and Wachs, expressing the chromatic quasisymmetric function of the incomparability graph of a natural unit interval order in terms of power sum symmetric functions, is proven. The proof uses a formula of Roichman for the irreducible characters of the symmetric group.Comment: Final version, 9 pages; comments by a referee incorporate

Involutions and the Gelfand character

The Gelfand representation of $\mathcal{S}_n$ is the multiplicity-free direct sum of the irreducible representations of $\mathcal{S}_n$. In this paper, we use a result of Adin, Postnikov, and Roichman to find a recursive generating function for the Gelfand character. In order to find this generating function, we investigate descents of so-called $\lambda$-unimodal involutions

Splitting the cohomology of Hessenberg varieties and e-positivity of chromatic symmetric functions

For each indifference graph, there is an associated regular semisimple Hessenberg variety, whose cohomology recovers the chromatic symmetric function of the graph. The decomposition theorem applied to the forgetful map from the regular semisimple Hessenberg variety to the projective space describes the cohomology of the Hessenberg variety as a sum of smaller pieces. We give a combinatorial description of the Frobenius character of each piece. This provides a generalization of the symmetric functions attached to Stanley's local h-polynomials of the permutahedral variety to any Hessenberg variety. As a consequence, we can prove that the coefficient of $e_{\lambda}$, where $\lambda$ is any partition of length 2, in the e-expansion of the chromatic symmetric function of any indifference graph is non-negative.Comment: 23 page

Chromatic quasisymmetric functions

We introduce a quasisymmetric refinement of Stanley's chromatic symmetric function. We derive refinements of both Gasharov's Schur-basis expansion of the chromatic symmetric function and Chow's expansion in Gessel's basis of fundamental quasisymmetric functions. We present a conjectural refinement of Stanley's power sum basis expansion, which we prove in special cases. We describe connections between the chromatic quasisymmetric function and both the $q$-Eulerian polynomials introduced in our earlier work and, conjecturally, representations of symmetric groups on cohomology of regular semisimple Hessenberg varieties, which have been studied by Tymoczko and others. We discuss an approach, using the results and conjectures herein, to the $e$-positivity conjecture of Stanley and Stembridge for incomparability graphs of $(3+1)$-free posets.Comment: 57 pages; final version, to appear in Advances in Mat