Birational automorphisms of quartic Hessian surfaces

Abstract

We find generators of the group of birational automorphisms of the Hessian surface of a general cubic surface. Its nonsingular minimal model is a K3 surface with the Picard lattice of rank 16. The latter embeds naturally in the even unimodular lattice $II^{1,25}$ of rank 26 and signature $(1,25)$ as the orthogonal complement of a root sublattice of rank 10. Our generators are related to reflections with respect to some Leech roots. A similar observation was made first in the case of quartic Kummer surfaces in the work of S. Kond$\bar {\roman o}$. We shall explain how our generators are related to the generators of the group of birational automorphisms of a general quartic Kummer surface which is birationally isomorphic to a special Hessian surface.