Sphere packings. III: Extremal cases (Q734998)

This paper is the third in the series of six papers by the author devoted to the proof of the Kepler's conjecture, all in Discrete Comput. Geom. 36, no. 1. This famous conjecture, open since 1611, asserts that no packing of congruent balls in three dimensions has density greater than the face-centered cubic packing. In the previous paper of this series a compact topological space of decomposition stars was defined, and a continuous scoring function on this space was introduced. Moreover, Kepler's conjecture was related to a certain conjecture about location of global maxima of this scoring function. The goal of the current paper is to prove that the two conjectured global maxima of the scoring function (corresponding to decomposition stars of the face-centered cubic and hexagonal-close packings) are at least local maxima. In addition, general upper bounds for the scoring function on various other decomposition stars are obtained.