English

Spherical coverings and X-raying convex bodies of constant width

Metric Geometry 2025-04-15 v3

Abstract

K. Bezdek and Gy. Kiss showed that existence of origin-symmetric coverings of unit sphere in En\mathbb{E}^n by at most 2n2^n congruent spherical caps with radius not exceeding arccosn12n\arccos\sqrt{\frac{n-1}{2n}} implies the XX-ray conjecture and the illumination conjecture for convex bodies of constant width in En\mathbb{E}^n, and constructed such coverings for 4n64\le n\le 6. Here we give such constructions with fewer than 2n2^n caps for 5n155\le n\le 15. For the illumination number of any convex body of constant width in En\mathbb{E}^n, O.~Schramm proved an upper estimate with exponential growth of order (3/2)n/2(3/2)^{n/2}. In particular, that estimate is less than 32n23\cdot 2^{n-2} for n16n\ge 16, confirming the above mentioned conjectures for the class of convex bodies of constant width. Thus, our result settles the outstanding cases 7n157\le n\le 15. We also show how to calculate the covering radius of a given discrete point set on the sphere efficiently on a computer.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.06398,
  title  = {Spherical coverings and X-raying convex bodies of constant width},
  author = {A. Bondarenko and A. Prymak and D. Radchenko},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.06398},
  year   = {2025}
}