On the Sausage Catastrophe in 4 Dimensions

Abstract

The Sausage Catastrophe of J. Wills (1983) is the observation that in $d=3$ and $d=4$, the densest packing of $n$ spheres in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ is a sausage for small values of $n$ and jumps to a full-dimensional packing for large $n$ without passing through any intermediate dimensions. Let $n_{d}^{*}$ be the smallest value of $n$ for which the densest packing of $n$ spheres in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ is full-dimensional and $N_{d}^{*}$ be the smallest value of $N$ for which the densest packing of $N$ spheres in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ is full-dimensional for all $N\geq N_{d}^{*}$. We extend the work of Gandini and Zucco (1992) to obtain new upper bounds of $n_{4}^{*}\leq338,\!196$ and $N_{4}^{*}\leq516,\!946$. Some lengthy and repetitive components of the proof of the latter result were obtained using interval arithmetic.