Finite Sphere Packings

Part of the Universitext book series (UTX)

Abstract

How can one pack m unit spheres in E n such that the volume or the surface area of their convex hull is minimal?

Let m be a positive integer, and let u be a unit vector in E n . Then, we define
$$ \begin{gathered} {\mathbf{ }}L_m = \left\{ {2i{\text{u}}:i = 0,1,...,m - 1} \right\} \hfill \\ {\text{and}} \hfill \\ {\mathbf{ }}S_{m,n} = {\text{conv}}\left\{ {S_n + L_m } \right\}. \hfill \\ {\text{Clearly}},{\mathbf{ }}S_n + L_m {\mathbf{ }}{\text{is a packing in}}{\mathbf{ }}S_{m,n} .{\mathbf{ }}{\text{Writing}} \hfill \\ {\mathbf{ }}\mu _m \left( {S_n } \right) = \frac{{mv\left( {S_n } \right)}} {{v\left( {S_{m,n} } \right)}}, \hfill \\ \hfill \\ \end{gathered} $$
, it can be regarded as a local density of Sn + Lm in Sm,n. By routine computation it follows that
$$ \mu _m \left( {S_n } \right) = \frac{{m\omega }} {{\omega _n + 2\left( {m - 1} \right)\omega _{n - 1} }} \gg \delta \left( {S_n } \right). $$
Based on this observation, in 1975 L. Fejes Tóth [10] made the following conjecture about the volume case of the above problem.

Keywords

Unit Vector Convex Hull Unit Sphere Convex Body Isoperimetric Inequality 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. 1999

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