Congruent and non-congruent hyperball packings related to doubly truncated Coxeter orthoschemes in hyperbolic 3-space (Q2178494)

In hyperbolic \(3\)-space \(\mathbb{H}^3\), packings of hyperballs (sets of points whose distance from a given plane does not exceed a given distance \(h>0\)) are related to associated tilings of \(\mathbb{H}^3\) by truncated simplices. This allows a local definition of density of hyperball packings. It is shown that the densest packing of congruent hyperballs related to doubly truncated Coxeter orthoschemes is based on the tiling with Schläfli symbol \(\{7,3,7\}\) and attains a density of \(\approx 0.81335\). The author conjectures that this cannot be improved by dropping the condition of congruence of the hyperballs.