Kronecker positivity and 2-modular representation theory

Abstract: This paper consists of two prongs. Firstly, we prove that any Specht module labelled by a 2-separated partition is semisimple and we completely determine its decomposition as a direct sum of graded simple modules. Secondly, we apply these results and other modular representation theoretic techniques on the study of Kronecker coefficients and hence verify Saxl's conjecture for a large new class of partitions.