Primitive central idempotents of finite group rings of symmetric groups

Let be a prime. We denote by the symmetric group of degree , by the alternating group of degree and by the field with elements. An important concept of modular representation theory of a finite group is the notion of a block. The blocks are in one-to-one correspondence with block idempotents, which are the primitive central idempotents of the group ring , where is a prime power. Here, we describe a new method to compute the primitive central idempotents of for arbitrary prime powers and arbitrary finite groups . For the group rings of the symmetric group, we show how to derive the primitive central idempotents of from the idempotents of . Improving the theorem of Osima for symmetric groups we exhibit a new subalgebra of which contains the primitive central idempotents. The described results are most efficient for . In an appendix we display all primitive central idempotents of and for which we computed by this method.