Rigidity of planar tilings (Q1187503)

A perturbation of a tiling of a region in \(\mathbb{R}^ d\) is a set of isometries, one applied to each tile, such that the images of the tiles tile the same region. The author shows that a locally finite tiling of an open region in \(\mathbb{R}^ 2\) (with tiles being closures of their interiors) is rigid, i.e., the discontinuity set of any sufficiently small perturbation consists of straight lines and arcs of circles, and the perturbation near such a curve shifts points along the direction of that curve. As is shown by a 3-dimensional basic construction (which is extendable to more complicated non-rigid tilings), this rigidity type does not hold for \(d\geq 3\). Moreover, the author uses this rigidity notion to show that any tiling problem in \(\mathbb{R}^ 2\) with finitely many tile shapes has a tiling combinatorics equivalent to that of a polygonal tiling problem.