Barnes–Wall lattice

In mathematics, the Barnes–Wall lattice Λ16, discovered by Eric Stephen Barnes and G. E. (Tim) Wall (Barnes & Wall (1959)), is the 16-dimensional positive-definite even integral lattice of discriminant 28 with no norm-2 vectors. It is the sublattice of the Leech lattice fixed by a certain automorphism of order 2, and is analogous to the Coxeter–Todd lattice.
The automorphism group of the Barnes–Wall lattice has order 89181388800 = 221 35 52 7 and has structure 21+8 PSO8+(F2). There are 4320 vectors of norm 4 in the Barnes–Wall lattice (the shortest nonzero vectors in this lattice).
The genus of the Barnes–Wall lattice was described by Scharlau & Venkov (1994) and contains 24 lattices; all the elements other than the Barnes–Wall lattice have root system of maximal rank 16.
The Barnes–Wall lattice is described in detail in (Conway & Sloane 1999, section 4.10).

While Λ16 is often referred to as the Barnes-Wall lattice, their original article in fact construct a family of lattices of increasing dimension n=2k for any integer k, and increasing normalized minimal distance, namely n1/4. This is to be compared to the normalized minimal distance of 1 for the trivial lattice , and an upper bound of given by Minkowski's theorem applied to Euclidean balls. Interestingly, this family comes with a polynomial time decoding algorithm by Micciancio & Nicolesi (2008).
Generating matrix
The generator matrix for the Barnes-Wall Lattice is given by the following matrix:
The lattice spanned by the following matrix is isomorphic to the above,
Lattice theta function
The lattice theta function for the Barnes Wall lattice is known as
where the thetas are Jacobi theta functions.
Note that the lattice theta functions for , are
where
References
- Barnes, E. S.; Wall, G. E. (1959), "Some extreme forms defined in terms of Abelian groups", J. Austral. Math. Soc., 1 (1): 47–63, doi:10.1017/S1446788700025064, MR 0106893
- Conway, John Horton; Sloane, Neil J. A. (1999), Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups, Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften, vol. 290 (3rd ed.), Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 978-0-387-98585-5, MR 0920369
- Scharlau, Rudolf; Venkov, Boris B. (1994), "The genus of the Barnes–Wall lattice.", Comment. Math. Helv., 69 (2): 322–333, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.29.9284, doi:10.1007/BF02564490, MR 1282375
- Micciancio, Daniele; Nicolesi, Antonio (2008), "Efficient bounded distance decoders for Barnes-Wall lattices", 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, pp. 2484–2488, doi:10.1109/ISIT.2008.4595438, ISBN 978-1-4244-2256-2
External links
- Barnes–Wall lattice at Sloane's lattice catalogue.