Closing a Platonic gap (Q2354124)

The article studies geometric shapes formed by finite sequences (chains) of non-overlapping congruent regular tetrahedra in 3-space in which successive tetrahedra meet face-to-face. It is known that a perfectly closed ring, a tetratorus, formed by a sequence of this kind cannot exist [\textit{S. Świerczkowski}, Nederl. Akad. Wet., Proc., Ser. A 61, 376--378 (1958; Zbl 0084.02902); Colloq. Math. 7, 9--10 (1959; Zbl 0092.38701)]. The authors construct several striking examples of fake tetratori, that is, of chains of tetrahedra which come extremely close to being perfectly closed. For example, there exists a fake tetratorus formed by 164 tetrahedra of edge length 1, in which the gap error between corresponding vertices of the terminal tetrahedra is less that \(1.1\cdot 10^{-14}\).\ It is conjectured that for every \(\varepsilon>0\) there exists a fake tetratorus with gap error less than \(\varepsilon\).