Abstract:Recently there has been much effort in the quantum information community to prove (or disprove) the existence of symmetric informationally complete (SIC) sets of quantum states in arbitrary finite dimension. This paper strengthens the urgency of this question by showing that if SIC-sets exist: (1) by a natural measure of orthonormality, they are as close to being an orthonormal basis for the space of density operators as possible; and (2) in prime dimensions, the standard construction for complete sets of mutually unbiased bases and Weyl-Heisenberg covariant SIC-sets are intimately related: The latter represent minimum uncertainty states for the former in the sense of Wootters and Sussman. Finally, we contribute to the question of existence by conjecturing a quadratic redundancy in the equations for Weyl-Heisenberg SIC-sets.

Five years ago, Lane Hughston showed that some of the symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measures (SICs) in dimension 3 coincide with the Hesse configuration (a structure well known to algebraic geometers, which arises from the torsion points of a certain elliptic curve). This connection with elliptic curves is signalled by the presence of linear dependencies among the SIC vectors. Here we look for analogous connections between SICs and algebraic geometry by performing computer searches for linear dependencies in higher dimensional SICs. We prove that linear dependencies will always emerge in Weyl-Heisenberg orbits when the fiducial vector lies in a certain subspace of an order 3 unitary matrix. This includes SICs when the dimension is divisible by 3 or equal to 8 mod 9. We examine the linear dependencies in dimension 6 in detail and show that smaller dimensional SICs are contained within this structure, potentially impacting the SIC existence problem. We extend our results to look for linear dependencies in orbits when the fiducial vector lies in an eigenspace of other elements of the Clifford group that are not order 3. Finally, we align our work with recent studies on representations of the Clifford group.

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Magic states can be used as a resource to circumvent the restrictions due to stabilizer-preserving operations, and magic-state conversion has not been studied in the single-copy regime thus far.Here we solve the question of whether a stabilizer-preserving quantum operation exists that can convert between two given magic states in the single-shot regime. We first phrase this question as a feasibility problem for a semi-definite program (SDP), which provides a procedure for constructing a stabilizer-preserving quantum operation (free channel) if it exists. Then we employ a variant of the Farkas Lemma to derive necessary and sufficient conditions for existence, and this method is used to construct a complete set of magic monotones.Recently, the resource theory of magic has attracted much attention [7][8][9][10][11]. In this framework, free operations are the set of allowed operations, i.e., stabilizer operations. Resource states, namely the magic states, are required in order to achieve some desired task. In a realistic setting wherein the resources are finite, one is * mehdi.ahmadi@ucalgary.ca † hoan.dang@ucalgary.ca ‡ gour@ucalgary.ca § sandersb@ucalgary.ca