Contact graphs of ball packings

Abstract

A contact graph of a packing of closed balls is a graph with balls as vertices and pairs of tangent balls as edges. We prove that the average degree of the contact graph of a packing of balls (with possibly different radii) in $\mathbb{R}^3$ is not greater than $13.92$. We also find new upper bounds for the average degree of contact graphs in $\mathbb{R}^4$ and $\mathbb{R}^5$.