Mutually unbiased frames

Abstract

In this work, the concept of mutually unbiased frames is introduced as the most general notion of unbiasedness for sets composed by linearly independent and normalized vectors. It encompasses the already existing notions of unbiasedness for orthonormal bases, regular simplices, equiangular tight frames, positive operator valued measure, and also includes symmetric informationally complete quantum measurements. After introducing the tool, its power is shown by finding the following results about the last mentioned class of constellations: (i) real fiducial states do not exist in any even dimension, and (ii) unknown d-dimensional fiducial states are parameterized, a priori, with roughly 3d/2 real variables only, without loss of generality. Furthermore, multi-parametric families of pure quantum states having minimum uncertainty with regard to several choices of d+1 orthonormal bases are shown, in every dimension d. These last families contain all existing fiducial states in every finite dimension, and the bases include maximal sets of d+1 mutually unbiased bases, when d is a prime number.