Six-dimensional sphere packing and linear programming

Abstract

We prove that the Cohn–Elkies linear programming bound for sphere packing is not sharp in dimension 6. The proof uses duality and optimization over a space of modular forms, generalizing a construction of Cohn–Triantafillou [Math. Comp. 91 (2021), pp. 491–508] to the case of odd weight and non-trivial character.