Indeed, as in the quote from the GAP manual given by @Shaun, trying to do this immediately in GAP fails:
gap> G:=SymmetricGroup(5);
Sym( [ 1 .. 5 ] )
gap> t:=CharacterTable(G);
CharacterTable( Sym( [ 1 .. 5 ] ) )
gap> t mod 3;
fail
The GAP Character Table Library is provided by the CTblLib package (in most installations, it is loaded by default, otherwise one should load it first with LoadPackage("ctbllib");
. Then you can retrieve the character table from the library. In your example, do the following:
gap> t:=CharacterTable("S5") mod 3;
BrauerTable( "A5.2", 3 )
gap> Irr(t);
[ Character( BrauerTable( "A5.2", 3 ), [ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ] ),
Character( BrauerTable( "A5.2", 3 ), [ 1, 1, 1, -1, -1 ] ),
Character( BrauerTable( "A5.2", 3 ), [ 6, -2, 1, 0, 0 ] ),
Character( BrauerTable( "A5.2", 3 ), [ 4, 0, -1, 2, 0 ] ),
Character( BrauerTable( "A5.2", 3 ), [ 4, 0, -1, -2, 0 ] ) ]
See ?AllCharacterTableNames
in GAP to search in identifiers of library tables. It could narrow the search if you are not sure which identifier to use, For example,
gap> AllCharacterTableNames(Size,120);
[ "2.A5", "2.A6M2", "2.Alt(5)", "2xA5", "A5.2", "A6.2_1M3", "D120", "L2(25)M3", "Sym(5)" ]
gap> AllCharacterTableNames(Size,7920,IsSimple,true);
[ "HSM9", "M11", "M12M2", "ONM11" ]