Distance geometry for kissing spheres (Q2348019)

Let \(I\) be a set and \(d: I \times I \to \mathbb R_{\geq 0}\) a non-negative function such that \(d(i, j) = d(j, i)\) and \(d(i, i) =0\) for all \(i\), \(j \in I\). Then \((I, d)\) is called a distance space. Let \(\hat{\mathbb E}^n\) denote the extended \(n\)-dimensional Euclidean space \(\mathbb E^n \cup \{\infty\}\). Fixing a ball in \(\hat{\mathbb E}^n\) as the reference ball, a kissing sphere is a sphere tangent to the reference ball, and let \(\mathbb K^n\) be the set of kissing spheres in \(\hat{\mathbb E}^n\). In this paper, the author establishes the following main results: Theorem (A). Given a finite distance space \((I, d)\), where \(d\) is not identically zero, the following statements are equivalent: (i) \((I, d)\) is isometrically embeddable into \((\mathbb K^n, d_K)\), where \(d_K\) is the distance function of \(\mathbb K^n\). (ii) The rank of the distance matrix \(D(I,d)\) is at most \(n+1\) and \((-1)^{| J|}\det D(J,d) \leq 0\) for all \(J \subseteq I\). (iii) The distance matrix \(D(I, d)\) has exactly one positive eigenvalue and at most \(n\) negative eigenvalues. Theorem (B). \((\mathbb K^n, d_K)\) and \((\mathbb L^n_+, d_L)\) are isometric, where \((\mathbb L^n_+, d_L)\) is the set of vectors whose last coordinate is positive excluding the origin.