Bounding the density of spherical polygon packings

Abstract

We determine putative optimal packings of regular spherical polygons via optimization on smooth manifolds. For several cases, we establish maximality by extending the Lovász theta number to Cayley graphs on the special orthogonal group $\mathrm{SO}(3)$. To this end, we introduce an algebraic criterion characterizing when congruent regular spherical polygons have disjoint interiors, leading to a unified formulation of the packing constraints. Using harmonic analysis on $\mathrm{SO}(3)$, we reduce the theta number to a trigonometric sum-of-squares problem, which can be solved via semidefinite programming.

38 pages, 3 figures