Stability of optimal spherical codes

Abstract For many extremal configurations of points on a sphere, the linear programming approach can be used to show their optimality. In this paper we establish the general framework for showing stability of such configurations and use this framework to prove the stability of the two spherical codes formed by minimal vectors of the lattice $$E_8$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>E</mml:mi> <mml:mn>8</mml:mn> </mml:msub> </mml:math> and of the Leech lattice.