Conics on Barth-Bauer octics

Abstract

We analyze the configurations of conics and lines on a special class of Kummer octic surfaces. In particular, we bound the number of conics by 176 and show that there is a unique surface with 176 conics, all irreducible: it admits a faithful action of one of the Mukai groups. Therefore, we also discuss conics and lines on Mukai surfaces: we discover a double plane (ramified at a smooth sextic curve) that contains 8,910 smooth conics.