Chromatic functions, interval orders and increasing forests

Abstract: The chromatic quasisymmetric functions (csf) of Shareshian and Wachs associated to unit interval orders have attracted a lot of interest since their introduction in 2016, both in combinatorics and geometry, because of their relation to the famous Stanley-Stembridge conjecture (1993) and to the topology of Hessenberg varieties, respectively. In the present work we study the csf associated to the larger class of interval orders with no restriction on the length of the intervals. Inspired by an article of Abreu and Nigro, we show that these csf are weighted sums of certain quasisymmetric functions associated to the increasing spanning forests of the associated incomparability graphs. Furthermore, we define quasisymmetric functions that include the unicellular LLT symmetric functions and generalize an identity due to Carlsson and Mellit. Finally we conjecture a formula giving their expansion in the type 1 power sum quasisymmetric functions which should extend a theorem of Athanasiadis.