Planar graphs and Stanley's Chromatic Functions

Abstract: This article is dedicated to the study of positivity phenomena for the chromatic symmetric function of a graph with respect to various bases of symmetric functions. We give a new proof of Gasharov's theorem on the Schur-positivity of the chromatic symmetric function of a $(3 + 1)$-free poset. We present a combinatorial interpretation of the Schur-coefficients in terms of planar networks. Compared to Gasharov's proof, it gives a clearer visual illustration of the cancellation procedures and is quite similar in spirit to the proof of monomial positivity of Schur functions via the Lindstrom-Gessel-Viennot lemma. We apply a similar device to the $e$-positivity problem of chromatic functions. Following Stanley, we analyze certain analogs of symmetric functions attached to graphs instead of working with chromatic symmetric functions of graphs directly. We introduce a new combinatorial object: the correct sequences of unit interval orders, and, using these, we reprove monomial positivity of $G$-analogues of the power sum symmetric functions.