Penny-packings with minimal second moments (Q1894696)

As a step towards obtaining the densest packings of unit disks in the plane, the authors consider the second moment of a packing with respect to the centroid of the circle centers. \textit{R. L. Graham} and \textit{N. J. A. Sloane} conjectured in Discrete Comput. Geom. 5, No. 1, 1-11 (1990; Zbl 0686.52010) that optimal second moment packings would have their centers on the hexagonal lattice. Let us call these packings hexagonal. The authors show that the constructions by Graham and Sloane, which involve circular or greedy packings, do not always give optimal second moment among hexagonal packings. They present an algorithm that does achieve optimal second moment among hexagonal packings, for any number of unit disks. Interestingly, they also show that an optimal second moment packing should be circular, although not every circular packing of a given size has the same moments.