One way of overcoming this inefficiency is to partition the domain into cells of edge length smaller than r c . The pairwise interactions are then not just computed between neighboring cells, but between all cells within r c of each other (first suggested in and implemented and analysed in and ). This approach can be taken to the limit wherein each cell holds at most one single particle, therefore reducing the number of spurious pairwise distance evaluations to zero. This gain in efficiency, however, is quickly offset by the number of cells C β β that need to be inspected for every interaction with a cell C α α , which, for example in three dimensions, grows cubically with the inverse of the cell edge length. Setting the edge length to r c / 2 , however, already reduces the number of spurious distance evaluations to 63%.