Irreducible p-Brauer characters of p-power degree for the symmetric and alternating groups

Starting from the question when all irreducible p-Brauer characters for a symmetric or an alternating group are of p-power degree, we classify the p-modular irreducible representations of p-power dimension in some families of representations for these groups. In particular, this then allows to confirm a conjecture by W. Willems for the alternating groups. Received: 14 June 2006