Not Doomed to Fail

Abstract

In their recent manuscript "An Uplifting Discussion of T-Duality", arXiv:1707.08888, J. Harvey and G. Moore have reevaluated a mod two condition appearing in asymmetric orbifold constructions as an obstruction to the description of certain symmetries of toroidal conformal field theories by means of automorphisms of the underlying charge lattice. The relevant "doomed to fail" condition determines whether or not such a lattice automorphism g may lift to a symmetry in the corresponding toroidal conformal field theory without introducing extra phases. If doomed to fail, then in some cases, the lift of g must have double the order of g. It is an interesting question, whether or not "geometric" symmetries are affected by these findings. In the present note, we answer this question in the negative, by means of elementary linear algebra: "geometric" symmetries of toroidal conformal field theories are not doomed to fail. Consequently, and in particular, the symmetry groups involved in symmetry surfing the moduli space of K3 theories do not differ from their lifts.

10 pages, no figures, clarifications added. Version accepted for publication in JHEP

References in corpus (8)

• Notes on the K3 Surface and the Mathieu group M_24
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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Tracking the symmetries of ${\mathbb{Z}}_3$-orbifold K3s within the Mathieu groups