Two classes of posets with real-rooted chain polynomials

Christos A. Athanasiadis, Katerina Kalampogia-Evangelinou

Published 2023-07-10Version 1

The coefficients of the chain polynomial of a finite poset enumerate chains in the poset by their number of elements. It has been a challenging open problem to determine which posets have real-rooted chain polynomials. Two new classes of posets with this property, namely those of all rank-selected subposets of Cohen-Macaulay simplicial posets and all noncrossing partition lattices associated to irreducible finite Coxeter groups, are presented here. The first result generalizes one of Brenti and Welker. As a special case, the descent enumerator of permutations of the set $\{1, 2,\dots,n\}$ which have ascents at specified positions is shown to be real-rooted, hence unimodal, and a good estimate for the location of the peak is deduced.