The mutually unbiased bases revisited

Abstract

The study of Mutually Unbiased Bases continues to be developed vigorously, and presents several challenges in the Quantum Information Theory. Two orthonormal bases in $\mathbb C^d, B {and} B'$ are said mutually unbiased if $\forall b\in B, b'\in B'$ the scalar product $b\cdot b'$ has modulus $d^{-1/2}$. In particular this property has been introduced in order to allow an optimization of the measurement-driven quantum evolution process of any state $\psi \in \mathbb C^d$ when measured in the mutually unbiased bases $B\_{j} {of} \mathbb C^d$. At present it is an open problem to find the maximal umber of mutually Unbiased Bases when $d$ is not a power of a prime number. \noindent In this article, we revisit the problem of finding Mutually Unbiased Bases (MUB's) in any dimension $d$. The method is very elementary, using the simple unitary matrices introduced by Schwinger in 1960, together with their diagonalizations. The Vandermonde matrix based on the $d$-th roots of unity plays a major role. This allows us to show the existence of a set of 3 MUB's in any dimension, to give conditions for existence of more than 3 MUB's for $d$ even or odd number, and to recover the known result of existence of $d+1$ MUB's for $d$ a prime number. Furthermore the construction of these MUB's is very explicit. As a by-product, we recover results about Gauss Sums, known in number theory, but which have apparently not been previously derived from MUB properties.