Multiplicity-free Kronecker products of characters of the symmetric groups (Q1678148)

An important open problem in the representation theory of finite symmetric groups is a description of the multiplicities of irreducible characters in inner tensor products of irreducible characters. These multiplicities are called Kronecker coefficients. The main result of the paper under review classifies multiplicity-free inner tensor products of irreducible characters of finite symmetric groups. Here, ``multiplicity-free'' means that all Kronecker coefficients are 0 or 1. There are 6 cases; for details we refer to the paper. In these 6 cases, formulae for the relevant Kronecker coefficients are also provided. The main result of the paper confirms a conjecture by the first author and \textit{A. Kleshchev} [Pac. J. Math. 190, No. 2, 201--223 (1999; Zbl 1009.20013)]. The authors also classify multiplicity-free products of skew characters. A consequence of their results is that a product of three nonlinear irreducible characters of a finite symmetric group is never multiplicity-free.