Corona limits of tilings: periodic case (Q1731461)

A tile is a nonempty compact set which is the closure of its interior. A tiling of the Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^l$ is a covering of $\mathbb{R}^l$ by tiles without interior overlaps. A tiling is said to be a Delone tiling if there exist two positive real constants $s$ and $S$ such that for any tile $T$ in the tiling, there exists a ball of radius $s$ lying within $T$ and there exists a ball of radius $S$ which contains $T$. In the paper tilings under consideration are assumed to be Delone tilings. \par A patch $P$ is a nonempty subset of a tiling. An adjacency relation is defined axiomatically. In particular, there exist the point adjacency and edge adjacency. The $n$th corona of $P$ is defined inductively as follows. The $0$th corona of $P$ is the patch $P$. The $(n+1)$th corona of $P$ is the patch of the tiling whose tiles are adjacent to some tile of the $n$th corona. So a sequence of $k$th coronas ($k=0, 1, 2, \dots$) is defined. In the paper the authors study the corona limit, and namely a limit shape of the $k$th corona as $k$ tends to $\infty$, which models the growth of crystals. \par For Delone tilings the existence and uniqueness of corona limits is discussed. The concept of directional speeds is introduced and it is shown that corona limit, if it exists, is completely described by directional speeds. \par Remark that corona limits were extensively investigated by a group of Russian mathematicians including Zhuravlev, Shutov and Maleev. However the authors of the paper learned about this fact and their results after the article was submitted. \par As an application, the authors give another proof that the corona limit of a periodic tiling is a centrally symmetric convex polyhedron (the result was proved earlier by the above mentioned Russian mathematicians). Also, the authors compute the corona limits of all 1-uniform and 2-uniform tilings of the plane classified by B.~Gr\"nbaum and G.~C.~Shephard for both the point adjacency and edge adjacency.