Thurston's sphere packings on 3-dimensional manifolds, I

Abstract

Thurston's sphere packing on a 3-dimensional manifold is a generalization of Thusrton's circle packing on a surface, the rigidity of which has been open for many years. In this paper, we prove that Thurston's Euclidean sphere packing is locally determined by combinatorial scalar curvature up to scaling, which generalizes Cooper-Rivin-Glickenstein's local rigidity for tangential sphere packing on 3-dimensional manifolds. We also prove the infinitesimal rigidity that Thurston's Euclidean sphere packing can not be deformed (except by scaling) while keeping the combinatorial Ricci curvature fixed.