Mutually Unbiased Bases, Spherical Designs, and Frames

The principle of complementarity lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. In finite dimensional quantum systems this principle is captured by pairs of observables which are given by mutually unbiased bases (MUBs). Two orthonormal bases B and C of C^d are mutually unbiased if |langle b | c rangle|^2 = 1/d holds for all vectors b in B and c in C. This implies that whenever we are given a vector from one of these bases and perform a measurement with respect to any other of the bases, then there is no information gained from this measurement. A basic question about MUBs is how many of them can be found in a given dimension d. While constructions of maximal sets of d+1 such bases are known for system of prime power dimension d, it is unknown whether this bound can be achieved for any non-prime power dimension. We review the known constructions of MUBs and demonstrate that maximal sets of MUBs come with a rich combinatorial structure by showing that they actually are the same objects as the complex projective 2-designs with angle set {0,1/d}. Furthermore, we address the problem of constructing positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) in finite dimension d consisting of d^2 operators of rank one which have an inner product equal to uniform or very close to uniform. This is motivated by the related question of constructing symmetric informationally complete POVMs (SIC-POVMs) for which the inner products are perfectly uniform. We also give a simple proof of the fact that symmetric informationally complete POVMs are complex projective 2-designs with angle set {1/(d+1)}. Moreover, we show that MUBs and SIC-POVMs form uniform tight frames in C^d.