Plane Partitions and Characters of the Symmetric Group

In this paper we show that the existence of plane partitions, which are minimal in a sense to be defined, yields minimal irreducible summands in the Kronecker product of two irreducible characters of the symmetric group S(n). The minimality of the summands refers to the dominance order of partitions of n. The multiplicity of a minimal summand equals the number of pairs of Littlewood-Richardson multitableaux of shape (, ), conjugate content and type . We also give lower and upper bounds for these numbers.