Optimal Narain CFTs from codes

Abstract

Recently established connection between additive codes and Narain CFTs provides a new tool to construct theories with special properties and solve modular bootstrap constraints by reducing them to algebraic identities. We generalize previous constructions to include many new theories, in particular we show that all known optimal Narain theories, i.e. those maximizing the value of spectral gap, can be constructed from codes. For asymptotically large central charge c we show there are code theories with the spectral gap growing linearly with c, with the coefficient saturating the conjectural upper bound. We therefore conjecture that optimal Narain theories for any value of c can be obtained from codes.