Locally optimal 2-periodic sphere packings
Abstract
The sphere packing problem is an old puzzle. We consider packings with m spheres in the unit cell (m-periodic packings). For the case m = 1 (lattice packings), Voronoi proved there are finitely many inequivalent local optima and presented an algorithm to enumerate them, and this computation has been implemented in up to d = 8 dimensions. We generalize Voronoi's method to m > 1 and present a procedure to enumerate all locally optimal 2-periodic sphere packings in any dimension, provided there are finitely many. We implement this computation in d = 3, 4, and 5 and show that no 2-periodic packing surpasses the density of the optimal lattices in these dimensions. A partial enumeration is performed in d = 6.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1704.08156,
title = {Locally optimal 2-periodic sphere packings},
author = {Alexei Andreanov and Yoav Kallus},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.08156},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
v2: final journal accepted version, appendix on locally finite polyhedra added