A New Bound on the Local Density of Sphere Packings

It is shown that a packing of unit spheres in three-dimensional Euclidean space can have density at most 0.773055 .... and that a Voronoi polyhedron defined by such a packing must have volume at least 5.41848 .... These bounds are superior to the best bounds previously published [5] (0.77836 and 5.382, respectively), but are inferior to the tight bounds of 0.7404... and 5.550... claimed by Hsiang [2]. Our bounds are proved by cutting a Voronoi polyhedron into cones, one for each of its faces. A lower bound is established on the volume of each cone as a function of its solid angle. Convexity arguments then show that the sum of all the cone volume bounds is minimized when there are 13 faces each of solid angle 47~/13.