Improving Rogers’ Upper Bound for the Density of Unit Ball Packings via Estimating the Surface Area of Voronoi Cells from Below in Euclidean \sl d -Space for All \sl d ≥ \bf 8

The sphere packing problem asks for the densest packing of unit balls in Ed. This problem has its roots in geometry, number theory and information theory and it is part of Hilbert's 18th problem. One of the most attractive results on the sphere packing problem was proved by Rogers in 1958. It can be phrased as follows. Take a regular d-dimensional simplex of edge length 2 in Ed and then draw a d-dimensional unit ball around each vertex of the simplex. Let sigmad denote the ratio of the volume of the portion of the simplex covered by balls to the volume of the simplex. Then the volume of any Voronoi cell in a packing of unit balls in Ed is at least omegad/sigmad , where omegad denotes the volume of a d-dimensional unit ball. This has the immediate corollary that the density of any unit ball packing in Ed is at most sigmad . In 1978 Kabatjanskii and Levenstein improved this bound for large d. In fact, Rogers' bound is the presently known best bound for 4 is less than or equal to d is less than or equal to 42, and above that the Kabatjanskii-Levenstein bound takes over. In this paper we improve Rogers' upper bound for the density of unit ball packings in Euclidean d-space for all d is greater than or equal to and improve the Kabatjanskii-Levenstein upper bound in small dimensions. Namely, we show that the volume of any Voronoi cell in a packing of unit balls in Ed, d is greater than or equal to 8, is at least omegad/sigmad and so the density of any unit ball packing in Ed, d is greater than or equal to 8, is at most sigmad where, sigmad is a geometrically well-defined quantity satisfying the inequality. Sigmad < sigmad for all d is greater than or equal to 8. We prove this by showing that the surface area of any Voronoi cell in a packing of unit balls in Ed, d is greater than or equal to 8, is at least (d.omegad)/Sigmad. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]