Kromatic quasisymmetric functions

Abstract

We provide a construction for the kromatic symmetric function $\overline{X}_G$ of a graph introduced by Crew, Pechenik, and Spirkl using combinatorial (linearly compact) Hopf algebras. As an application, we show that $\overline{X}_G$ has a positive expansion into multifundamental quasisymmetric functions. We also study two related quasisymmetric $q$-analogues of $\overline{X}_G$, which are $K$-theoretic generalizations of the quasisymmetric chromatic function of Shareshian and Wachs. We classify exactly when one of these analogues is symmetric. For the other, we derive a positive expansion into symmetric Grothendieck functions when $G$ is the incomparability graph of a natural unit interval order.