How many faces can the polycubes of lattice tilings by translation of \(\mathbb R^3\) have? (Q640462)

Summary: We construct a class of polycubes that tile the space by translation in a latticeperiodic way and show that for this class the number of surrounding tiles cannot be bounded. The first construction is based on polycubes with an \(L\)-shape but with many distinct tilings of the space. Nevertheless, we are able to construct a class of more complicated polycubes such that each polycube tiles the space in a unique way and such that the number of faces is \(4k + 8\) where \(2k + 1\) is the volume of the polycube. This shows that the number of tiles that surround the surface of a space-filler cannot be bounded.