In 1998, the second author of this paper raised the problem of classifying the irreducible characters of Sn of prime power degree. Zalesskii proposed the analogous problem for quasi-simple groups, and he has, in joint work with Malle, made substantial progress on this latter problem. With the exception of the alternating groups and their double covers, their work provides a complete solution. In this article we first classify all the irreducible characters of Sn of prime power degree (Theorem 2.4), and then we deduce the corresponding classification for the alternating groups (Theorem 5.1), thus providing the answer for one of the two remaining families in Zalesskii's problem. This classification has another application in group theory. With it, we are able to answer, for alternating groups, a question of Huppert: which simple groups G have the property that there is a prime p for which G has an irreducible character of p-power degree > 1 and all of the irreducible characters of G have degrees that are relatively prime to p or are powers of p?

The case of the double covers of the symmetric and alternating groups will be dealt with in a forthcoming paper; in particular, this completes the answer to Zalesskii's problem.

The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, some results on hook lengths in partitions are proved. These results lead to an algorithm which allows us to show that every irreducible representation of Sn with prime power degree is labelled by a partition having a large hook. In Section 3, we obtain a new result concerning the prime factors of consecutive integers (Theorem 3.4). In Section 4 we prove Theorem 2.4, the main result. To do so, we combine the algorithm above with Theorem 3.4 and work of Rasala on minimal degrees. This implies Theorem 2.4 for large n. To complete the proof, we check that the algorithm terminates appropriately for small n (that is, those n [les ] 9.25 · 108) with the aid of a computer. In the last section we derive the classification of irreducible characters of An of prime power degree, and we solve Huppert's question for alternating groups.