Bitangents to symmetric quartics

Abstract

Recall that a non-singular planar quartic is a canonically embedded non-hyperelliptic curve of genus three. We say such a curve is symmetric if it admits non-trivial automorphisms. The classification of (necessarily finite) groups appearing as automorphism groups of non-singular curves of genus three dates back to the last decade of the 19th century. As these groups act on the quartic via projective linear transformations, they induce symmetries on the 28 bitangents. Given such an automorphism group $G=\mathrm{Aut}(C)$, we prove the $G$-orbits of the bitangents are independent of the choice of $C$, and we compute them for all twelve types of smooth symmetric planar quartic curves. We further observe that techniques deriving from equivariant homotopy theory directly reveal patterns which are not obvious from a classical moduli perspective.