Error-Correcting Codes Associated With Generalized Hadamard Matrices Over Groups

Classical Hadamard matrices are orthogonal matrices whose elements are ±1. It is well-known that error correcting codes having large minimum distance between codewords can be associated with these Hadamard matrices. Indeed, the success of early Mars deep-space probes was strongly dependent upon this communication technology. The concept of Hadamard matrices with elements drawn from an Abelian group is a natural generalization of the concept. For the case in which the dimension of the matrix is q and the group consists of the p-th roots of unity, these generalized Hadamard matrices are called “Butson Hadamard Matrices BH(p, q)”, first discovered by A. T. Butson [6]. In this dissertation it is shown that an error correcting code whose codewords consist of real numbers in finite Galois field Gf( p) can be associated in a simple way with each Butson Hadamard matrix BH(p, q), where p \u3e 0 is a prime number. Distance properties of such codes are studied, as well as conditions for the existence of linear codes, for which standard decoding techniques are available. In the search for cyclic linear generalized Hadamard codes, the concept of an M-invariant infinite sequence whose elements are integers in a finite field is introduced. Such sequences are periodic of least period, T, and have the interesting property, that arbitrary identical rearrangements of the elements in each period yields a periodic sequence with the same least period. A theorem characterizing such M-invariant sequences leads to discovery of a simple and efficient polynomial method for constructing generalized Hadamard matrices whose core is a linear cyclic matrix and whose row vectors constitute a linear cyclic error correcting code. In addition, the problem is considered of determining parameter sequences {tn} for which the corresponding potential generalized Hadamard matrices BH(p, ptn) do not exist. By analyzing quadratic Diophantine equations, new methods for constructing such parameter sequences are obtained. These results show the rich number theoretic complexity of the existence question for generalized Hadamard matrices

Distance-regular graphs

This is a survey of distance-regular graphs. We present an introduction to distance-regular graphs for the reader who is unfamiliar with the subject, and then give an overview of some developments in the area of distance-regular graphs since the monograph 'BCN' [Brouwer, A.E., Cohen, A.M., Neumaier, A., Distance-Regular Graphs, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1989] was written.Comment: 156 page

Quantum information with continuous variables

Quantum information is a rapidly advancing area of interdisciplinary research. It may lead to real-world applications for communication and computation unavailable without the exploitation of quantum properties such as nonorthogonality or entanglement. We review the progress in quantum information based on continuous quantum variables, with emphasis on quantum optical implementations in terms of the quadrature amplitudes of the electromagnetic field.Comment: accepted for publication in Reviews of Modern Physic

Measurement-based quantum computation beyond the one-way model

We introduce novel schemes for quantum computing based on local measurements on entangled resource states. This work elaborates on the framework established in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 220503 (2007), quant-ph/0609149]. Our method makes use of tools from many-body physics - matrix product states, finitely correlated states or projected entangled pairs states - to show how measurements on entangled states can be viewed as processing quantum information. This work hence constitutes an instance where a quantum information problem - how to realize quantum computation - was approached using tools from many-body theory and not vice versa. We give a more detailed description of the setting, and present a large number of new examples. We find novel computational schemes, which differ from the original one-way computer for example in the way the randomness of measurement outcomes is handled. Also, schemes are presented where the logical qubits are no longer strictly localized on the resource state. Notably, we find a great flexibility in the properties of the universal resource states: They may for example exhibit non-vanishing long-range correlation functions or be locally arbitrarily close to a pure state. We discuss variants of Kitaev's toric code states as universal resources, and contrast this with situations where they can be efficiently classically simulated. This framework opens up a way of thinking of tailoring resource states to specific physical systems, such as cold atoms in optical lattices or linear optical systems.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure

Uniformity in association schemes and coherent configurations: cometric Q-antipodal schemes and linked systems

Inspired by some intriguing examples, we study uniform association schemes and uniform coherent configurations, including cometric Q-antipodal association schemes. After a review of imprimitivity, we show that an imprimitive association scheme is uniform if and only if it is dismantlable, and we cast these schemes in the broader context of certain --- uniform --- coherent configurations. We also give a third characterization of uniform schemes in terms of the Krein parameters, and derive information on the primitive idempotents of such a scheme. In the second half of the paper, we apply these results to cometric association schemes. We show that each such scheme is uniform if and only if it is Q-antipodal, and derive results on the parameters of the subschemes and dismantled schemes of cometric Q-antipodal schemes. We revisit the correspondence between uniform indecomposable three-class schemes and linked systems of symmetric designs, and show that these are cometric Q-antipodal. We obtain a characterization of cometric Q-antipodal four-class schemes in terms of only a few parameters, and show that any strongly regular graph with a ("non-exceptional") strongly regular decomposition gives rise to such a scheme. Hemisystems in generalized quadrangles provide interesting examples of such decompositions. We finish with a short discussion of five-class schemes as well as a list of all feasible parameter sets for cometric Q-antipodal four-class schemes with at most six fibres and fibre size at most 2000, and describe the known examples. Most of these examples are related to groups, codes, and geometries.Comment: 42 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Published version, minor revisions, April 201