On automorphisms of nodal Enriques surfaces

Abstract

1. Introduction. The purpose of this note is to announce a descrip-tion of the automorphism group of a generic Enriques surface which con-tains a nonsingular rational curve (a nodal Enriques surface). The automor-phism group of a generic unnodal Enriques surface was recently computed by W. Barth, C. Peters, and V. Nikulin (see [B-P]). As opposed to the transcen-