Chromatic quasisymmetric functions of the path graph

Abstract

We show that the chromatic quasisymmetric function (CQF) of a labeled path graph on $n$ vertices is not symmetric unless the labeling is the natural labeling $1, 2, ..., n$ or its reverse $n, ..., 2, 1$. We also show that the star graph $K_{1, n-1}$ with $n\geq 3$ has a nonsymmetric CQF for all labelings.