Locally optimal 2-periodic sphere packings Alexei Andreanov∗ Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Daejeon 34126, Republic of Korea Yoav Kallus Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA 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. Keywords: sphere packing, periodic point set, quadratic form, Ryshkov polyhedron 2010 MSC: 52C17, 11H55, 52B55, 90C26 arXiv:1704.08156v2 [math.MG] 12 Nov 2019 1. Introduction The sphere packing problem asks for the highest possible density achieved by an arrangement of nonoverlapping spheres in a Euclidean space of d dimensions. ∗Corresponding author Email addresses:
[email protected] (Alexei Andreanov),
[email protected] (Yoav Kallus) Preprint submitted to Journal of LATEX Templates May 31, 2021 The exact solutions are known in d = 2 [1], d = 3 [2], d = 8 [3] and d = 24 [4]. This natural geometric problem is useful as a model of material systems and their phase transitions, and, even in nonphysical dimensions,it is related to fundamental questions about crystallization and the glass transition [5].The sphere packing problem also arises in the problem of designing an optimal error- correcting code for a continuous noisy communication channel [6].