Automorphisms of unnodal Enriques surfaces

Abstract

It follows from an observation of A. Coble in 1919 that the automorphism group of an unnodal Enriques surface contains the $2$-congruence subgroup of the Weyl group of the $E_{10}$-lattice. In this article, we determine how much bigger the automorphism group of an unnodal Enriques surface can be. Furthermore, we show that the automorphism group is in fact equal to the $2$-congruence subgroup for generic Enriques surfaces in arbitrary characteristic (under the additional assumption that the Enriques surface is ordinary if the characteristic is $2$), improving the corresponding result of W. Barth and C. Peters for very general Enriques surfaces over the complex numbers.