Radial Density in Apollonian Packings

Given an Apollonian Circle Packing $\mathcal{P}$ and a circle $C_0 = \partial B(z_0, r_0)$ in $\mathcal{P}$, color the set of disks in $\mathcal{P}$ tangent to $C_0$ red. What proportion of the concentric circle $C_ε = \partial B(z_0, r_0 + ε)$ is red, and what is the behavior of this quantity as $ε\rightarrow 0$? Using equidistribution of closed horocycles on the modular surface $\mathbb{H}^2/SL(2, \mathbb{Z})$, we show that the answer is $\frac{3}π = 0.9549\dots$ We also describe an observation due to Alex Kontorovich connecting the rate of this convergence in the Farey-Ford packing to the Riemann Hypothesis. For the analogous problem for Soddy Sphere packings, we find that the limiting radial density is $\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2V_T}=0.853\dots$, where $V_T$ denotes the volume of an ideal hyperbolic tetrahedron with dihedral angles $π/3$.

No reviews yet.

No comments yet.