Stationary Apollonian Packings

Abstract

The notion of stationary Apollonian packings in the d-dimensional Euclidean space is introduced as a mathematical formalization of so-called random Apollonian packings and rotational random Apollonian packings, which constitute popular grain packing models in physics. Apart from dealing with issues of existence and uniqueness in the entire Euclidean space, asymptotic results are provided for the growth durations and it is shown that the packing is space-filling with probability 1, in the sense that the Lebesgue measure of its complement is zero. Finally, the phenomenon is studied that grains arrange in clusters and properties related to percolation are investigated.