Nicolas Gastineau, Olivier Togni
Abstract
The face-centered cubic grid is a three dimensional 12-regular infinite grid. This graph represents an optimal way to pack spheres in the three-dimensional space. In this grid, the vertices represent the spheres and the edges represent the contact between spheres. We give lower and upper bounds on the chromatic number of the d th power of the face-centered cubic grid. In particular, in the case d = 2 we prove that the chromatic number of this grid is 13. We also determine sharper bounds for d = 3 and for subgraphs of of the face-centered cubic grid.