Abelian groups and packing by semicrosses (Q800641)

We investigate integer lattice packings by certain star bodies in \(\mathbb R^ n\). These objects, called ``semicrosses'', are defined as follows: If \(k\) and \(n\) are positive integers, a \((k,n)\)-semicross consists of \(kn+1\) unit cubes in \(\mathbb R^ n\), a ``corner'' cube parallel to the coordinate axes together with \(n\) arms of length \(k\) attached to faces of the cube, one such arm pointing in the direction of each positive coordinate axis. An integer lattice packing is a lattice packing in which the coordinates of all the translating vectors are integers. We investigate how densely such packings pack \(\mathbb R^ n\) for large \(k\). We show that, for fixed \(n\geq 3,\) this density is asymptotic to \(n \sec (\pi /n)/(2\sqrt{k})\) (for \(n=1\) or 2 the density is 1 for all \(k\).) To prove this, we first translate the problem into the following question about finite abelian groups: What is the smallest abelian group \(G\) which contains a subset \(S\) of cardinality \(n\) for which the elements \(ms\) with \(1\leq m\leq k\) and \(s\in S\) are distinct and nonzero? We show that, for fixed \(n\geq 3,\) the order of the smallest such group is asymptotic to \(2 \cos (\pi /n) k^{3/2}.\) The proof uses the following inequality: If \(n\) is an integer \(\geq 3\) and \(x_ 1,x_ 2,\dots,x_{n-1}\) are real numbers in \([0,1]\), then there are distinct indices \(i\) and \(j\) such that \(x_ 1(1-x_ j)\) and \(x_ j(1-x_ i)\) are both less than or equal to \(\tfrac14\sec^ 2(\pi /n).\) This result is best possible.