show/hide this revision's text 2 atoning for my errors.

Yes, there has been a lot of work by Fred Cohen (University of Rochester, currently at IAS) on the subject. He has been giving talks about this (he calls it the hard sphere model), but I can't seem to find a relevant paper/preprint. Perhaps you can contact him directly. EDIT I have somehow managed to confuse Cohen's work and Matt Kahle's (if you know them both, you know how impressive a feat that is). Matt's answer is the true received wisdom.

show/hide this revision's text 1

Yes, there has been a lot of work by Fred Cohen (University of Rochester, currently at IAS) on the subject. He has been giving talks about this (he calls it the hard sphere model), but I can't seem to find a relevant paper/preprint. Perhaps you can contact him directly.