Few-cosine spherical codes and Barnes–Wall lattices

Using Barnes–Wall lattices and 1-cocycles on finite groups of monomial matrices, we give a procedure to construct tricosine spherical codes. This was inspired by a 14-dimensional code which Ballinger, Cohn, Giansiracusa and Morris discovered in studies of the universally optimal property. Their code has 64 vectors and cosines . We construct the Optimism Code, a 4-cosine spherical code with 256 unit vectors in 16-dimensions. The cosines are . Its automorphism group has shape 21+8⋅GL(4,2). The Optimism Code contains a subcode related to the BCGM code. The Optimism Code implies existence of a nonlinear binary code with parameters (16,256,6), a Nordstrom–Robinson code, and gives a context for determining its automorphism group, which has form .