  The problem of finding the asymptotic behavior of the maximal density of
sphere packings in high Euclidean dimensions is one of the most fascinating and
challenging problems in discrete geometry. One century ago, Minkowski obtained
a rigorous lower bound that is controlled asymptotically by $1/2^d$, where $d$
is the Euclidean space dimension. An indication of the difficulty of the
problem can be garnered from the fact that exponential improvement of
Minkowski's bound has proved to be elusive, even though existing upper bounds
suggest that such improvement should be possible. Using a
statistical-mechanical procedure to optimize the density associated with a
"test" pair correlation function and a conjecture concerning the existence of
disordered sphere packings [S. Torquato and F. H. Stillinger, Experimental
Math. {\bf 15}, 307 (2006)], the putative exponential improvement was found
with an asymptotic behavior controlled by $1/2^{(0.77865...)d}$. Using the same
methods, we investigate whether this exponential improvement can be further
improved by exploring other test pair correlation functions correponding to
disordered packings. We demonstrate that there are simpler test functions that
lead to the same asymptotic result. More importantly, we show that there is a
wide class of test functions that lead to precisely the same exponential
improvement and therefore the asymptotic form $1/2^{(0.77865...)d}$ is much
more general than previously surmised.

Statistical Mechanics