U-Duality and the Leech Lattice

Abstract: It has recently been shown that the full automorphism group of the Leech lattice, Conway's group Co_0, can be generated by 3 x 3 matrices over the octonions. We show such matrices are of type F_4 in E_{6(-26)}, the U-duality group for N=2, D=5 exceptional magic supergravity. By mapping points of the Leech lattice to black hole charge vectors, it is seen Co_0 is generated by U-duality transformations acting as rotations in the charge space for BPS black holes.