A few more trees the chromatic symmetric function can distinguish

Abstract

A well-known open problem in graph theory asks whether Stanley’s chromatic symmetric function, a generalization of the chromatic polynomial of a graph, distinguishes between any two nonisomorphic trees. Previous work has proven the conjecture for a class of trees called spiders. This paper generalizes the class of spiders to $n$-spiders, where normal spiders correspond to $n=1$, and verifies the conjecture for $n=2$.