Unit distances and diameters in Euclidean spaces (Q1006401)

In the 1950's, Lenz noticed that in \(d\geq 4\) dimensions, taking two orthogonal planes in one point \(p\), and taking two circles centered at \(p\) in the respective planes, the distances between any two points from the two circles are the same. In any even dimension \(d\geq 4\) this construction can be extended to \(d/2\) pairwise orthogonal planes pairwise intersecting in the origin, taking all \(d/2\) circles of radius \(1/\sqrt{2}\). A finite point set from the \(d/2\) circles is called a \textit{Lenz configuration}. (A slightly modified definition yields Lenz configurations in odd dimension.) The main result of the paper is that for each \(d\geq 4\), there exists \(N(d)\), such that all extremal sets of \(n\geq N(d)\) points (with respect to the number of unit distances or diameters) are Lenz configurations. As a corollary, for all \(d\geq 6\) even dimension the \textit{exact} maximum number of unit distances is determined for all sufficiently large number of points (depending on the dimension); and the \textit{exact} maximum number of diameters for all \(d\geq 4\) even dimension is determined for all sufficiently large number of points (depending on the dimension). The proof techniques hinge on extremal graph theory, namely the Erdős-Stone theorem and Erdős-Simonovits stability theorem.