Sphere packings, II

Abstract

An earlier paper describes a program to prove the Kepler conjecture on sphere packings. This paper carries out the second step of that program. A sphere packing leads to a decomposition of ℝ3 into polyhedra. The polyhedra are divided into two classes. The first class of polyhedra, called quasi-regular tetrahedra, have density at most that of a regular tetrahedron. The polyhedra in the remaining class have density at most that of a regular octahedron (about 0.7209).