Symmetries of K3 lattices in the Mathieu group M_24

Anne Taormina (Durham)

Tuesday 26th October, 2010 15:00-16:00 Mathematics Building, room 515

Abstract

There is mounting circumstantial evidence that strings compactified on K3 surfaces harbour symmetries of the sporadic group M_24. In this talk, I will briefly review how this sporadic group emerges from the K3 untwisted elliptic genus, and set the scene for future investigations on how this symmetry might manifest itself in certain N=4 superconformal field theories. This involves realising explicitly the symplectic automorphisms groups of a class of K3 surfaces as subgroups of M_24, i.e. as permutation groups of 24 elements preserving the extended binary Golay code.

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