New upper bounds on sphere packings I

We prove a lower bound on the entropy of sphere packings of $\mathbb R^d$ of density $\Theta(d \cdot 2^{-d})$. The entropy measures how plentiful such packings are, and our result is significantly stronger than the trivial lower bound that can be obtained from the mere existence of a dense packing. Our method also provides a new, statistical-physics-based proof of the $\Omega(d \cdot 2^{-d})$ lower bound on the maximum sphere packing density by showing that the expected packi...

We show there exists a packing of identical spheres in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with density at least \[ (1-o(1))\frac{d \log d}{2^{d+1}}\, , \] as $d\to\infty$. This improves upon previous bounds for general $d$ by a factor of order $\log d$ and is the first asymptotically growing improvement to Rogers' bound from 1947.

We prove upper bounds on the average kissing number $k(\mathcal{P})$ and contact number $C(\mathcal{P})$ of an arbitrary finite non-congruent sphere packing $\mathcal{P}$, and prove an upper bound on the packing density $\delta(\mathcal{P})$ of an arbitrary infinite non-congruent sphere packing $\mathcal{P}$.

The classical sphere packing problem asks for the best (infinite) arrangement of non-overlapping unit balls which cover as much space as possible. We define a generalized version of the problem, where we allow each ball a limited amount of overlap with other balls. We study two natural choices of overlap measures and obtain the optimal lattice packings in a parameterized family of lattices which contains the FCC, BCC, and integer lattice.

In this paper we determine new upper bounds for the maximal density of translative packings of superballs in three dimensions (unit balls for the $l^p_3$-norm) and of Platonic and Archimedean solids having tetrahedral symmetry. Thereby, we improve Zong's recent upper bound for the maximal density of translative packings of regular tetrahedra from $0.3840\ldots$ to $0.3745\ldots$, getting closer to the best known lower bound of $0.3673\ldots$ We apply the linear programming ...

We revisit the problem of high-dimensional multiple packing in Euclidean space. Multiple packing is a natural generalization of sphere packing and is defined as follows. Let $ N>0 $ and $ L\in\mathbb{Z}_{\ge2} $. A multiple packing is a set $\mathcal{C}$ of points in $ \mathbb{R}^n $ such that any point in $ \mathbb{R}^n $ lies in the intersection of at most $ L-1 $ balls of radius $ \sqrt{nN} $ around points in $ \mathcal{C} $. We study the multiple packing problem for both ...

We examine packing of $n$ congruent spheres in a cube when $n$ is close but less than the number of spheres in a regular cubic close-packed (ccp) arrangement of $\lceil p^{3}/2\rceil$ spheres. For this family of packings, the previous best-known arrangements were usually derived from a ccp by omission of a certain number of spheres without changing the initial structure. In this paper, we show that better arrangements exist for all $n\leq\lceil p^{3}/2\rceil-2$. We introduce ...

We improve upper bounds on sphere packing densities and sizes of spherical codes in high dimensions. In particular, we prove that the maximal sphere packing densities $\delta_n$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$ satisfy \[\delta_n\leq \frac{1+o(1)}{e}\cdot \delta^{\text{KL}}_{n}\] for large $n$, where $\delta^{\text{KL}}_{n}$ is the best bound on $\delta_n$ obtained essentially by Kabatyanskii and Levenshtein from the 1970s with improvements over the years. We also obtain the same improvemen...

We present an extension of known semidefinite and linear programming upper bounds for spherical codes. We apply the main result for the distance distribution of a spherical code and show that this method can work effectively In particular, we get a shorter solution to the kissing number problem in dimension 4.

This paper is an exposition, written for the Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde, about the two recent breakthrough results in the theory of sphere packings. It includes an interview with Henry Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, and Maryna Viazovska.