The action of the Weyl group on the \(E_8\) root system (Q2053670)

The center object studied in the paper is the action of the Weyl group \(W\) on the \(E_8\) root system. It is motivated by the connection to del Pezzo surfaces [\textit{R. van Luijk} and \textit{R. Winter}, ``Concurrent lines on del Pezzo surfaces of degree one'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1906.03162}]. Let \(\Gamma\) be the colored graph on the \(E_8\) root system where the color of an edge is the inner product of its vertices. A clique of \(\Gamma\) is a complete colored subgraph of \(\Gamma\). It is known that if two cliques in \(\Gamma\) are conjugated under the action of \(W\) then they are isomorphic. However, the inverse conclusion is not true in general. \textit{E. B. Dynkin} and \textit{A. N. Minchenko} [Transform. Groups 15, No. 4, 813--841 (2010; Zbl 1281.17012)] studied the bases of a subsystem of \(E_8\) and classified the isomorphic classes of these bases such that the inverse statement is valid. Such bases are called normal bases. They also determined when a homomorphism of two bases of subsystem extends to a homomorphism of the whole system. The main results of the paper are extensions of [loc. cit.]. More precisely, they extend normal bases in [loc. cit.] to a larger set of cliques in \(\Gamma\), numbered by \(I, II, III, IV\), such that the invert conclusion is true (Theorem 1). They also give conditions for an isomorphism of two cliques of new types to extend to an automorphism of the whole system (Theorem 2). The idea of the work comes from [loc. cit.]. The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 2 reviews root system \(E_8\) and the connection with del Pezzo surfaces. Section 3 and 4 reviews the result on the facets of \(E_8\) root polytope, cliques of type \(I, III\). Section 5 classifies cliques of type \(IV\). Section 6 proves the main theorems.