English

SIC-POVMs and the Extended Clifford Group

Quantum Physics 2015-06-26 v2

Abstract

We describe the structure of the extended Clifford Group (defined to be the group consisting of all operators, unitary and anti-unitary, which normalize the generalized Pauli group (or Weyl-Heisenberg group as it is often called)). We also obtain a number of results concerning the structure of the Clifford Group proper (i.e. the group consisting just of the unitary operators which normalize the generalized Pauli group). We then investigate the action of the extended Clifford group operators on symmetric informationally complete POVMs (or SIC-POVMs) covariant relative to the action of the generalized Pauli group. We show that each of the fiducial vectors which has been constructed so far (including all the vectors constructed numerically by Renes et al) is an eigenvector of one of a special class of order 3 Clifford unitaries. This suggests a strengthening of a conjuecture of Zauner's. We give a complete characterization of the orbits and stability groups in dimensions 2-7. Finally, we show that the problem of constructing fiducial vectors may be expected to simplify in the infinite sequence of dimensions 7, 13, 19, 21, 31,... . We illustrate this point by constructing exact expressions for fiducial vectors in dimensions 7 and 19.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0412001,
  title  = {SIC-POVMs and the Extended Clifford Group},
  author = {D. M. Appleby},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0412001},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

27 pages. Version 2 contains some additional discussion of Zauner's original conjecture, and an alternative, possibly stronger version of the conjecture in version 1 of this paper; also a few other minor improvements

R2 v1 2026-07-22T19:47:05.799Z