Bounds for solid angles of lattices of rank three (Q618321)

The celebrated kissing number problem asks for the maximal number of non-overlapping unit balls in the \(n\)-dimensional Euclidean space that touch another unit ball. The history of the problem goes back at least to Isaac Newton and to the famous argument between him and David Gregory, where Newton claimed that the kissing number in dimension three is \(12\) while Gregory believed it was \(13\). The correctness of Newton was proved only in the 1950s and, not surprisingly, the answer to the kissing problem is currently known only in dimensions \(2\), \(3\), \(4\), \(8\) and \(24\). The paper answers a number of hard questions related to the above problem. In this review we will mention two of them. The first one, given a spherical lattice-minimal triangle on a unit sphere in the \(n\)-dimensional space, asks for the minimal possible two-dimensional area it can have. The authors show that the area is at least \(0.551285598\dots\) which is the area of a special spherical triangle on the unit sphere in the three-dimensional space. It is very interesting to note that the triangle is formed by the minimal basis vectors of the face centered cubic lattice, normalized to lie on the unit sphere. The second question asks if there exist absolute constants \(C_1\) and \(C_2\) such that every lattice of rank three has a minimal basis that spans a solid angle in the interval \([C_1, C_2]\). The authors answer this question in the affirmative and provide in the course of the proof the precise constants \(C_1\) and \(C_2\).