The distribution of points on the sphere and corresponding cubature formulae

In applications, for instance in optics and astrophysics, thereis a need for high-accuracy integration formulae for functionson the sphere. To construct better formulae than previouslyused, almost equidistantly spaced nodes on the sphere and weightsbelonging to these nodes are required. This problem is closelyrelated to an optimal dispersion problem on the sphere and tothe theories of spherical designs and multivariate Gauss quadratureformulae. We propose a two-stage algorithm to compute optimal point locationson the unit sphere and an appropriate algorithm to calculatethe corresponding weights of the cubature formulae. Points aswell as weights are computed to high accuracy. These algorithmscan be extended to other integration problems. Numerical examplesshow that the constructed formulae yield impressively smallintegration errors of up to 10^-12.