Formulae and growth rates of high-dimensional polycubes (Q555508)

A \(d\)-dimensional polycube of size \(n\) is a connected set of \(n\) cubical cells on the lattice \(\mathbb{Z}^{d}\), where connectivity is through \((d-1)\)-faces. Two fixed polycubes are considered equivalent if one can be transformed into the other by a translation. (In contrast, two free polycubes are considered equivalent if one can be transformed into the other by a translation, flip, and/or rotation.) A fixed polycube is called improper in \(d\) dimensions if the centers of all its cubes lie in a common hyperplane of dimension strictly less than \(d\). In this paper the authors review Lunnon's formula that relates the total number of polycubes to the number of proper polycubes, develop a few diagonal formulae for the number of proper polycubes, in which the difference between the size and the dimension is at most 3, show that when the size of the polycubes is fixed, the number of polycubes is a (``row'') polynomial in the dimension and compute the first ten row polynomials. Based on the diagonal formulae, new formulae for the first three sequences of coefficients of these polynomials are computed. In this way some previously conjectured closed formulae for fixed (proper and improper) polycubes are rigorously proved. Finally, based on the row polynomials and the coefficient sequences, it is shown that the asymptotic growth-rate of the number of polycubes in \(d\) dimensions approaches \(2ed-o(d)\) as \(d\) tends to infinity and it is conjectured that it is asymptotically equal to \((2d-3)e+O(1/d)\).