The 290 fixed-point sublattices of the Leech lattice (Q903952): Difference between revisions

The Leech lattice is the most densely packed lattice in \( \mathbb{R}^{24} \). It is known that the group of isometries of \( \Lambda \) is the Conway group \( \mathrm{Co}_0 \) [\textit{J. H. Conway} Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 61, 398--400 (1968; Zbl 0186.32401)]. For a subgroup \( H\subseteq \mathrm{Co}_0 \), the sublattice \[ \Lambda^{H} = \{ v\in \Lambda \;| \;h(v)=v \;\;\text{for all \( h\in H \)} \} \] of \( \Lambda \) is called \textit{a fixed-point sublattice}. The group \( \mathrm{Co}_0 \) acts on the set of fixed-point sublattices by translation. In this paper, the authors prove that under the action of the group \( \mathrm{Co}_0 \), there are \( 290 \) orbits on the set of fixed-point sublattices of \( \Lambda \). In the proof, the authors use \textit{coordinate frames} (recall that a coordinate frame of the Leech lattice is a subset \(\{\pm w_1, \ldots, \pm w_{24}\} \) of pairwise orthogonal vectors of norm \( 8 \)) to construct the fixed-point sublattices. Conway showed that the group \(\mathrm{Co}_0 \) acts transitively on the set of all coordinate frames and the setwise stabilizer is the monomial group \( 2^{12}: M_{24} \) [\textit{J. H. Conway}, Invent. Math. 7, 137--142 (1969; Zbl 0212.07001)]. The authors develop an algorithm, which starting from the set of representatives of conjugate subgroups of the group \( 2^{12}: M_{24} \) that are not \( 2 \)-groups, outputs the list of fixed-point sublattices up to isometries. All the computations are done using the software MAGMA.