Irreducible characters with equal roots in the groups Sn and An

We show that treating of (non-trivial) pairs of irreducible characters of the group S_n sharing the same set of roots on one of the sets A_n and S_n A_n is divided into three parts. This, in particular, implies that any pair of such characters χ^α and χ^β (α and β are respective partitions of a number n) possesses the following property: lengths d(α) and d(β) of principal diagonals of Young diagrams for α and β differ by at most 1. Supported by RFBR grant No. 04-01-00463 and by RFBR-NSFC grant No. 05-01-39000. __________ Translated from Algebra i Logika, Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 3–25, January–February, 2007.