Counterexamples to the poset conjectures of Neggers, Stanley, and Stembridge

Abstract

We provide the first counterexamples to Neggers’ 1978 conjecture and Stembridge’s 1997 conjecture that the generating functions for descents and peaks in the linear extensions of naturally labeled posets should have all real zeros. We also provide minimum-sized counterexamples to a generalization of the Neggers conjecture due to Stanley that was recently disproved by Brändén.