A Percolating Hard Sphere Model

Abstract

Given a homogeneous Poisson point process in R^d, Haggstrom and Meester asked whether it is possible to place spheres (of differing radii) centred at the points, in a translation-invariant way, so that the spheres do not overlap but there is an unbounded component of touching spheres. We prove that the answer is yes in sufficiently high dimension.

20 pages, 2 figures