Spherical harmonics and the icosahedron

Abstract

We define a sextic invariant J on the seven-dimensional space of degree three spherical harmonics and show that J is positive if and only if the nodal set of the spherical harmonic contains the vertices of exactly two regular icosahedra. The proof uses the geometry of the Clebsch diagonal cubic surface, Atiyah's classification of vector bundles on an elliptic curve and a Fano threefold introduced by Mukai.