2026/05/12 by Kinga Kocsis
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.soft
41 pages, 27 figures, 2 tables
arxiv created 2026/05/12 · arxiv updated 2026/08/04
Soft cells are shapes without sharp corners that can fill the space without gaps and overlaps [2]. A sharp corner is a point on the surface of the solid through which no smooth curve passes. In the paper introducing the concept of soft cells [2], the authors proved that there exists an algorithm that can soften tilings consisting of convex polyhedra, preserving the lattice points and combinatorial structure of the original tiling. Although the algorithm guarantees (with a few restrictions) that there exists a soft tiling that is combinatorially equivalent to the convex polyhedral tiling, the proof does not address how to find all such tilings. For a polyhedral tiling based on a truncated octahedral cell, paper [3] shows how to find all soft tilings for a fixed symmetry group. In this paper, we extend this method and apply it to the cubic lattice, imposing only natural conditions, rather than symmetry constraints. The natural conditions being, the directions of edge half-tangents of the tiling are restricted to lattice directions, and the edges of the tiling are planar. This results in 26 soft cubic cells with different geometries. A total of 68 fundamental domains can be created from the cells, which can be classified into 8 groups based on their lattice symmetry. The paper also presents an algorithmic process (with a corresponding program in language Python) for classifying the 26 non-equivalent geometric cell types.