Minkowski Arrangements of Spheres

Let be a non-negative number not greater than 1. Consider an arrangement of (not necessarily congruent) spheres with positive homogenity in the n-dimensional Euclidean space, i.e., in which the infimum of the radii of the spheres divided by the supremum of the radii of the spheres is a positive number. With each sphere S of associate a concentric sphere of radius times the radius of S. We call this sphere the -kernel of S. The arrangement is said to be a Minkowski arrangement of order if no sphere of overlaps the -kernel of another sphere. The problem is to find the greatest possible density of n-dimensional Minkowski sphere arrangements of order . In this paper we give upper bounds on for .