Related papers: From the separable Tammes problem to extremal dist…
We introduce and study certain notions which might serve as substitutes for maximum density packings and minimum density coverings. A body is a compact connected set which is the closure of its interior. A packing $\cal P$ with congruent…
We use finite size scaling to study Ising spin glasses in two spatial dimensions. The issue of universality is addressed by comparing discrete and continuous probability distributions for the quenched random couplings. The sophisticated…
We consider tilings and packings of $\RR^d$ by integral translates of cubes $[0,2[^d$, which are $4\ZZ^d$-periodic. Such cube packings can be described by cliques of an associated graph, which allow us to classify them in dimension $d\leq…
Inspired by the boolean discrepancy problem, we study the following optimization problem which we term \textsc{Spherical Discrepancy}: given $m$ unit vectors $v_1, \dots, v_m$, find another unit vector $x$ that minimizes $\max_i \langle x,…
If most of the pixels in an $n \times m$ digital image are the same color, must the image contain a large connected component? How densely can a given set of connected components pack in $\mathbb{Z}^2$ without touching? We answer these two…
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…
Motivated by the search for best lattice sphere packings in Euclidean spaces of large dimensions we study randomly generated perfect lattices in moderately large dimensions (up to d=19 included). Perfect lattices are relevant in the…
It was shown that two distant particles can be entangled by sending a third particle never entangled with the other two [T. S. Cubitt et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 037902 (2003)]. In this paper, we investigate a class of three-qubit…
We use polynomial method techniques to bound the number of tangent pairs in a collection of $N$ spheres in $\mathbb{R}^n$ subject to a non-degeneracy condition, for any $n \geq 3$. The condition, inspired by work of Zahl for $n=3$, asserts…
Packings of regular convex polygons ($n$-gons) that are sufficiently dense have been studied extensively in the context of modeling physical and biological systems as well as discrete and computational geometry. Former results were mainly…
A set S of unit vectors in n-dimensional Euclidean space is called spherical two-distance set, if there are two numbers a and b, and inner products of distinct vectors of S are either a or b. The largest cardinality g(n) of spherical…
This paper provides upper and lower bounds on the kissing number of congruent radius $r > 0$ spheres in hyperbolic $\mathbb{H}^n$ and spherical $\mathbb{S}^n$ spaces, for $n\geq 2$. For that purpose, the kissing number is replaced by the…
Topology and geometry of a sphere create constraints for particles that lie on its surface which they otherwise do not experience in Euclidean space. Notably, the number of particles and the size of the system can be varied separately,…
We examine packing of $n$ congruent spheres in a cube when $n$ is close but less than the number of spheres in a regular cubic close-packed (ccp) arrangement of $\lceil p^{3}/2\rceil$ spheres. For this family of packings, the previous…
The original Thomson problem of "spherical crystallography" seeks the ground state of electron shells interacting via the Coulomb potential; however one can also study crystalline ground states of particles interacting with other…
We present a statistical mechanical description of randomly packed spherical particles, where the average coordination number is treated as a macroscopic thermodynamic variable. The overall packing entropy is shown to have two…
Let the kissing number $K(d)$ be the maximum number of non-overlapping unit balls in $\mathbb R^d$ that can touch a given unit ball. Determining or estimating the number $K(d)$ has a long history, with the value of $K(3)$ being the subject…
We investigate the formation of cluster crystals with multiply occupied lattice sites on a spherical surface in systems of ultra-soft particles interacting via repulsive, bounded pair potentials. Not all interactions of this kind lead to…
We apply the semidefinite programming approach developed in arxiv:math.MG/0608426 to obtain new upper bounds for codes in spherical caps. We compute new upper bounds for the one-sided kissing number in several dimensions where we in…
If every vertex in a map has one out of two face-cycle types, then the map is said to be $2$-semiequivelar. A 2-uniform tiling is an edge-to-edge tiling of regular polygons having $2$ distinct transitivity classes of vertices. Clearly, a…