Lattice Packing Densities in 3D
of Cubic and fcc lattices

 

Cubic packing

The cubic sphere packing has centers of spheres at all points (i,j,k) where i, j, and k are integers.  The radius of each sphere is 1/2.

cubic_packing.jpg (49152 bytes)


 Face centered cubic (fcc) packing

The face centered cubic packing has centers at each point on the lattice generated by the three vectors (0,1,1), (1,0,1), and (1,1,0).  The fcc lattice is just the set of points in the integer lattice whose sum is an even integer.   Points in the fcc lattice are a distance of square root of 2 from the neighboring point, so we take spheres of radius 21/2/2.

 

fcc_packing.jpg (28672 bytes)

The cubic lattice sphere packing can easily be tiled by cubes containing one sphere.  The fcc lattice sphere packing can be tiled by cubes as in the following figure.

fcc_cell.jpg (19590 bytes)

Now we can compute the densities of these two packings.