Sarnak–Chiu conjecture on the height of flat tori

Let L=CZnRnL=C\mathbb{Z}^n\subset\mathbb{R}^n be a lattice with Gram matrix G=CTCG=C^{\mathsf T}C and associated flat torus TL=Rn/LT_L=\mathbb{R}^n/L. Normalize to unit volume, so detG=1\det G=1. Its squared first minimum is

λ1(L)2=minmZn{0}mTGm.\lambda_1(L)^2=\min_{m\in\mathbb{Z}^n\setminus\{0\}}m^{\mathsf T}Gm.

Let ΔG\Delta_G be the nonnegative Laplacian on TLT_L, with spectral zeta function

ζΔG(s)=λSpec(ΔG){0}λs,\zeta_{\Delta_G}(s)=\sum_{\lambda\in\operatorname{Spec}(\Delta_G)\setminus\{0\}}\lambda^{-s},

and define the height by h(G)=ζΔG(0)h(G)=\zeta'_{\Delta_G}(0). Sarnak–Chiu conjecture. Among all nn-dimensional flat tori of volume one, the height is minimized by a torus corresponding to a lattice maximizing the length of its shortest nonzero vector. At fixed covolume, maximizing this shortest-vector length is equivalent to maximizing the density of the associated lattice sphere packing; the conjecture therefore relates an analytic optimization problem for the regularized determinant to the lattice sphere-packing problem. Its resolution is not supplied here, so its status remains open.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Nihar Gargava, “On two counterexamples in the geometry of numbers”, arXiv:2607.11695 (2026).

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