Related papers: Towards a proof of the 24-cell conjecture
The densest local packings of N identical nonoverlapping spheres within a radius Rmin(N) of a fixed central sphere of the same size are obtained using a nonlinear programming method operating in conjunction with a stochastic search of…
Particle packing problems have fascinated people since the dawn of civilization, and continue to intrigue mathematicians and scientists. Resurgent interest has been spurred by the recent proof of Kepler's conjecture: the face-centered cubic…
We study some sequences of functions of one real variable and conjecture that they converge uniformly to functions with certain positivity and growth properties. Our conjectures imply a conjecture of Cohn and Elkies, which in turn implies…
We study statistical and structural properties of extreme lattices, which are the local minima in the density landscape of lattice sphere packings, in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$. Specifically, we ascertain the…
In this paper we consider ball packings in $4$-dimensional hyperbolic space. We show that it is possible to exceed the conjectured $4$-dimensional realizable packing density upper bound due to L. Fejes T\'oth (Regular Figures, 1964). We…
Let H be a closed half-space of n-dimensional Euclidean space. Suppose S is a unit sphere in H that touches the supporting hyperplane of H. The one-sided kissing number B(n) is the maximal number of unit nonoverlapping spheres in H that can…
A family of spherical caps of the 2-dimensional unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^2$ is called a totally separable packing in short, a TS-packing if any two spherical caps can be separated by a great circle which is disjoint from the interior of each…
We present an efficient Monte Carlo method for the lattice sphere packing problem in d dimensions. We use this method to numerically discover de novo the densest lattice sphere packing in dimensions 9 through 20. Our method goes beyond…
It is commonly believed that the most efficient way to pack a finite number of equal-sized spheres is by arranging them tightly in a cluster. However, mathematicians have conjectured that a linear arrangement may actually result in the…
The average distance of the equal hard spheres is introduced to evaluate the density of a given arrangement. The absolute smallest value is two radii because the spheres can not be closer to each other than their diameter. The absolute…
Packing problems, which ask how to arrange a collection of objects in space to meet certain criteria, are important in a great many physical and biological systems, where geometrical arrangements at small scales control behaviour at larger…
The packing of hard spheres (HS) of diameter $\sigma$ in a cylinder has been used to model experimental systems, such as fullerenes in nanotubes and colloidal wire assembly. Finding the densest packings of HS under this type of confinement,…
Continuing the investigations of Harborth (1974) and the author (2002) we study the following two rather basic problems on sphere packings. Recall that the contact graph of an arbitrary finite packing of unit balls (i.e., of an arbitrary…
Based on results from the physics and mathematics literature which suggest a series of clearly defined conjectures, we formulate three simple scenarios for the fate of hard sphere crystallization in high dimension: (A) crystallization is…
The sphere packing problem asks for the densest packing of unit balls in d-dimensional Euclidean space. This problem has its roots in geometry, number theory and it is part of Hilbert's 18th problem. In 1958 C. A. Rogers proved a…
In this paper we prove that no packing of unit balls in Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^8$ has density greater than that of the $E_8$-lattice packing.
Dense packings have served as useful models of the structure of liquid, glassy and crystal states of matter, granular media, heterogeneous materials, and biological systems. Probing the symmetries and other mathematical properties of the…
This is the first in a series of papers giving a proof of the Kepler conjecture, which asserts that the density of a packing of congruent spheres in three dimensions is never greater than $\pi/\sqrt{18}\approx 0.74048...$. This is the…
One of the basic problems in discrete geometry is to determine the most efficient packing of congruent replicas of a given convex set $K$ in the plane or in space. The most commonly used measure of efficiency is density. Several types of…
The maximum possible number of non-overlapping unit spheres that can touch a unit sphere in $n$ dimensions is called kissing number. The problem for finding kissing numbers is closely connected to the more general problems of finding bounds…