  The densest local packings of N three-dimensional identical nonoverlapping
spheres within a radius Rmin(N) of a fixed central sphere of the same size are
obtained for selected values of N up to N = 1054. In the predecessor to this
paper [A.B. Hopkins, F.H. Stillinger and S. Torquato, Phys. Rev. E 81 041305
(2010)], we described our method for finding the putative densest packings of N
spheres in d-dimensional Euclidean space Rd and presented those packings in R2
for values of N up to N = 348. We analyze the properties and characteristics of
the densest local packings in R3 and employ knowledge of the Rmin(N), using
methods applicable in any d, to construct both a realizability condition for
pair correlation functions of sphere packings and an upper bound on the maximal
density of infinite sphere packings. In R3, we find wide variability in the
densest local packings, including a multitude of packing symmetries such as
perfect tetrahedral and imperfect icosahedral symmetry. We compare the densest
local packings of N spheres near a central sphere to minimal-energy
configurations of N+1 points interacting with short-range repulsive and
long-range attractive pair potentials, e.g., 12-6 Lennard-Jones, and find that
they are in general completely different, a result that has possible
implications for nucleation theory. We also compare the densest local packings
to finite subsets of stacking variants of the densest infinite packings in R3
(the Barlow packings) and find that the densest local packings are almost
always most similar, as measured by a similarity metric, to the subsets of
Barlow packings with the smallest number of coordination shells measured about
a single central sphere, e.g., a subset of the FCC Barlow packing. We
additionally observe that the densest local packings are dominated by the
spheres arranged with centers at precisely distance Rmin(N) from the fixed
sphere's center.
