English

Illumination number of 3-dimensional cap bodies

Metric Geometry 2026-02-05 v2

Abstract

The illumination conjecture asserts that any convex body in nn-dimensional Euclidean space can be illuminated by at most 2n2^n external light sources or parallel beams of light. Despite recent progress on the illumination conjecture, it remains open in general, as well as for specific classes of bodies. Bezdek, Ivanov, and Strachan showed that the conjecture holds for symmetric cap bodies in sufficiently high dimensions. Further, Ivanov and Strachan calculated the illumination number for the class of 3-dimensional centrally symmetric cap bodies to be 6. In this paper, we show that even the broader class of all 3-dimensional cap bodies has the same illumination number 6, in particular, the illumination conjecture holds for this class. The illuminating directions can be taken to be vertices of a regular tetrahedron, together with two special directions depending on the body. The proof is based on probabilistic arguments and integer linear programming.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.08712,
  title  = {Illumination number of 3-dimensional cap bodies},
  author = {Andrii Arman and Jaskaran Singh Kaire and Andriy Prymak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.08712},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Referee's comments incorporated