Related papers: Average kissing numbers for non-congruent sphere p…
In discrete geometry, the contact number of a given finite number of non-overlapping spheres was introduced as a generalization of Newton's kissing number. This notion has not only led to interesting mathematics, but has also found…
The so-called {\it kissing number} for hyperbolic surfaces is the maximum number of homotopically distinct systoles a surface of given genus $g$ can have. These numbers, first studied (and named) by Schmutz Schaller by analogy with lattice…
A packing of spherical caps on the surface of a sphere (that is, a spherical code) is called rigid or jammed if it is isolated within the space of packings. In other words, aside from applying a global isometry, the packing cannot be…
Sphere packings in high dimensions interest mathematicians and physicists and have direct applications in communications theory. Remarkably, no one has been able to provide exponential improvement on a 100-year-old lower bound on the…
A contact graph of a packing of closed balls is a graph with balls as vertices and pairs of tangent balls as edges. We prove that the average degree of the contact graph of a packing of balls (with possibly different radii) in…
A new upper bound $\kappa_T(K_n)\leq 2.9162^{(1+o(1))n}$ for the translative kissing number of the $n$-dimensional cross-polytope $K_n$ is proved, improving on Hadwiger's bound $\kappa_T(K_n)\leq 3^n-1$ from 1957. Furthermore, it is shown…
Contact numbers are natural extensions of kissing numbers. In this paper we give estimates for the number of contacts in a totally separable packing of n unit balls in Euclidean d-space for all n>1 and d>1.
Sphere packing problems have a rich history in both mathematics and physics; yet, relatively few analytical analyses of sphere packings exist, and answers to seemingly simple questions are unknown. Here, we present an analytical method for…
Since Isaac Newton first studied the Kissing Number Problem in 1694, determining the maximal number of non-overlapping spheres around a central sphere has remained a fundamental challenge. This problem is the local analogue of Hilbert's…
The contact graph of an arbitrary finite packing of unit balls in Euclidean 3-space is the (simple) graph whose vertices correspond to the packing elements and whose two vertices are connected by an edge if the corresponding two packing…
This is the fifth 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…
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…
We show that an analogy between crowding in fluid and jammed phases of hard spheres captures the density dependence of the kissing number for a family of numerically generated jammed states. We extend this analogy to jams of mixtures of…
We consider three-dimensional clusters of identical bubbles packed around a central bubble and calculate their energy and optimal shape. We obtain the surface area and bubble pressures to improve on existing growth laws for…
Let $N$ denote the maximum number of congruent infinite cylinders that can be arranged in $\mathbb{R}^3$ so that every pair of cylinders touches each other. Littlewood posed the question of whether $N=7$, which remains unsolved. In this…
We prove that the $D_4$ root system (the set of vertices of the regular $24$-cell) is the unique optimal kissing configuration in $\mathbb R^4$, and is an optimal spherical code. For this, we use semidefinite programming to compute an exact…
The boundedness of the kissing numbers of convex bodies has been known to Hadwiger for long. We present an application of it to the sum-product estimate…
We prove that the kissing number in 48 dimensions among antipodal spherical codes with certain forbidden inner products is 52\,416\,000. Constructions of attaining codes as kissing configurations of minimum vectors in even unimodular…
We generalize Banaszczyk's seminal tail bound for the Gaussian mass of a lattice to a wide class of test functions. From this we obtain quite general transference bounds, as well as bounds on the number of lattice points contained in…
The density of a code is the fraction of the coding space covered by packing balls centered around the codewords. This paper investigates the density of codes in the complex Stiefel and Grassmann manifolds equipped with the chordal…