New estimates of Hilbert-Kunz multiplicities for local rings of fixed dimension

We present results on the Watanabe-Yoshida conjecture for the Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity of a local ring of positive characteristic. By improving on a "volume estimate" giving a lower bound for Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity, we obtain the conjecture when the ring either has Hilbert-Samuel multiplicity less than or equal to five, or dimension less than or equal to six. For non-regular rings with fixed dimension, a new lower bound for the Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity is obtained.