New upper bounds for average kissing numbers
Abstract
A packing of balls in Euclidean space is a set of balls with non-overlapping interiors. For a finite packing of balls, its average contact number is the average number of balls tangent to a ball in this packing, that is, twice the total number of tangencies divided by the number of balls. The average kissing number of the space is defined as the supremum of average contact numbers over all finite ball packings. In this paper, we present a new semidefinite programming approach to average kissing numbers and improve upon known upper bounds in all dimensions 3 through 30. In particular, we provide the first improvements to the upper bounds in dimensions 10 through 30 obtained from kissing numbers. We also fully solve the average kissing number problem in dimensions 8 and 24 by showing that the average kissing numbers coincide with the kissing numbers, 240 and 196560, respectively. These values are limits of average contact numbers of finite subpackings from the E8 and Leech lattices.
Related
- New lower bounds for kissing numbers in dimensions 32-35 and 37-39
- New lower bounds for kissing numbers in dimensions $25−−31$
- RDT based upper bounds on the largest average submatrix values
- Upper bounds for ordered Ramsey numbers of forests and bounded-degree graphs
- On the lower- and upper bounds of three-colored anti-Ramsey numbers
BibTeX
@misc{bockhaus2026upper,
title = {{New upper bounds for average kissing numbers}},
author = {Mark Bockhaus and Alexey Glazyrin},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.36675},
eprint = {2610.36675},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36675},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - New upper bounds for average kissing numbers
AU - Mark Bockhaus
AU - Alexey Glazyrin
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.36675
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36675
AB - A packing of balls in Euclidean space is a set of balls with non-overlapping interiors. For a finite packing of balls, its average contact number is the average number of balls tangent to a ball in this packing, that is, twice the total number of tangencies divided by the number of balls. The average kissing number of the space is defined as the supremum of average contact numbers over all finite ball packings. In this paper, we present a new semidefinite programming approach to average kissing numbers and improve upon known upper bounds in all dimensions 3 through 30. In particular, we provide the first improvements to the upper bounds in dimensions 10 through 30 obtained from kissing numbers. We also fully solve the average kissing number problem in dimensions 8 and 24 by showing that the average kissing numbers coincide with the kissing numbers, 240 and 196560, respectively. These values are limits of average contact numbers of finite subpackings from the E_8 and Leech lattices.
ER -