A characterization of orthogonal permutative matrices of order 4

Abstract

Orthogonal matrices which are linear combinations of permutation matrices have attracted enormous attention in quantum information and computation. In this paper, we provide a complete parametric characterization of all complex, real and rational orthogonal permutative matrices of order 4. We show that any such matrix can always be expressed as a linear combination of up to four permutation matrices. Finally we determine several matrix spaces generated by linearly independent permutation matrices such that any orthogonal matrix in these spaces is always permutative or direct sum of orthogonal permutative matrices up to permutation of its rows and columns.