Sphere packings. IV: Detailed bounds (Q734999)

This paper is the fourth 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 second 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. These conjectured points were shown to be at least local maxima in the third paper of this series. The current paper contains the technical heart of the proof of Kepler's conjecture; its results rely on long computer calculations. The scoring function can be expressed as the sum of terms over different regions of the unit sphere. The main objective of this paper is to obtain good bounds on the values of the scoring function over such regions.