Transplanting Trees: Chromatic Symmetric Function Results through the Group Algebra of $S_n$

Angèle M. Foley, Joshua Kazdan, Larissa Kröll, Sofía Martínez Alberga, Oleksii Melnyk, Alexander Tenenbaum

Published 2021-12-18, updated 2022-01-20Version 2

One of the major outstanding conjectures in the study of chromatic symmetric functions (CSF's) states that trees are uniquely determined by their CSF's. Though verified on graphs of order up to twenty-nine, this result has been proved only for certain subclasses of trees. Using the definition of the CSF that emerges via the Frobenius character map applied to $\mathbb{C}[S_n]$, we offer new algebraic proofs of several results about the CSF's of trees. Additionally, we prove that a "parent function" of the CSF defined in the group ring of $S_n$ can uniquely determine trees, providing further support for Stanley's conjecture.