Counterexamples to a conjecture of Woods (Q2411583)

Well rounded lattices are those, whose minimal vectors span the euclidean space. \textit{A. C. Woods} conjectured in [J. Number Theory 4, 157--180 (1972; Zbl 0232.10020)] that the standard lattice \({\mathbb Z} ^n\) realises the maximum covering radius among all well rounded \(n\)-dimensional lattices of covolume 1. The present paper shows that this is not the case for all \(n\geq 30\) by explicitly constructing a series of lattices \(L_n = \alpha _1 \Lambda _{15} \perp \alpha _2 {\mathbb Z} ^{n-{15}}\) having larger covering radius than \({\mathbb Z}^n\). Here \(\Lambda _{15}\) is the laminated lattice of dimension 15 and \(\alpha _1,\alpha _2 \in {\mathbb R}_{>0}\) are uniquely determined by the property that \(L_n\) is well rounded of covolume 1.