Equiangular lines and spherical codes in Euclidean spaces

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Benny Sudakov, ETH Zürich
Fine Hall 214

A family of lines through the origin in Euclidean space is called equiangular if any pair of lines defines the same angle. The problem of estimating the maximum cardinality of such a family in $\mathbb{R}^n$ was extensively studied for the last 70 years. Answering a question of Lemmens and Seidel from 1973, in this talk we show that for every fixed angle $\theta$ and sufficiently large $n$ there are at most $2n-2$ lines in $\mathbb{R}^n$ with common angle $\theta$. Moreover, this is achievable only when $\theta =\arccos\frac{1}{3}$. Various extensions of this result to the more general settings of lines with $k$ fixed angles and of spherical codes will be discussed as well.  Joint work with I. Balla, F. Drexler and P. Keevash.