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. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019