Topology of crystallographic tiles (Q2467181)

The goal of the present paper is to study topological properties of crystiles. The authors give an algorithmic way to construct all the tiles \(\gamma(\tau)\) having non-empty intersection with the ``central tile'' \(\tau\) in a crystallographic tiling and give some upper bound for the runtime of this algorithm. In fact, the set of the neighboring tiles forms the set of vertices of a graph which the authors call the neighborhood graph on the tiling. In the case of two-dimensional crystiles this neighborhood graph is used to establish an algorithmic criterion which allows to check whether a given plane crystile is homeomorphic to a disk or not. This criterion is applied to Gelbrich's example in order to show which of his candidates are really disk-like.