Mermin's Pentagram as an Ovoid of PG(3,2)
Abstract
Mermin's pentagram, a specific set of ten three-qubit observables arranged in quadruples of pairwise commuting ones into five edges of a pentagram and used to provide a very simple proof of the Kochen-Specker theorem, is shown to be isomorphic to an ovoid (elliptic quadric) of the three-dimensional projective space of order two, PG(3,2). This demonstration employs properties of the real three-qubit Pauli group embodied in the geometry of the symplectic polar space W(5,2) and rests on the facts that: 1) the four observables/operators on any of the five edges of the pentagram can be viewed as points of an affine plane of order two, 2) all the ten observables lie on a hyperbolic quadric of the five-dimensional projective space of order two, PG(5,2), and 3) that the points of this quadric are in a well-known bijective correspondence with the lines of PG(3,2).
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1111.5923,
title = {Mermin's Pentagram as an Ovoid of PG(3,2)},
author = {Metod Saniga and Peter Levay},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1111.5923},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
5 pages, 4 figures