Entropic uncertainty relations and locking: tight bounds for mutually unbiased bases

We prove tight entropic uncertainty relations for a large number of mutually unbiased measurements. In particular, we show that a bound derived from the result by Maassen and Uffink for 2 such measurements can in fact be tight for up to sqrt{d} measurements in mutually unbiased bases. We then show that using more mutually unbiased bases does not always lead to a better locking effect. We prove that the optimal bound for the accessible information using up to sqrt{d} specific mutually unbiased bases is log d/2, which is the same as can be achieved by using only two bases. Our result indicates that merely using mutually unbiased bases is not sufficient to achieve a strong locking effect, and we need to look for additional properties.Comment: 9 pages, RevTeX, v3: complete rewrite, new title, many new results, v4: minor changes, published versio

Entanglement and quantum combinatorial designs

We introduce several classes of quantum combinatorial designs, namely quantum Latin squares, cubes, hypercubes and a notion of orthogonality between them. A further introduced notion, quantum orthogonal arrays, generalizes all previous classes of designs. We show that mutually orthogonal quantum Latin arrangements can be entangled in the same way than quantum states are entangled. Furthermore, we show that such designs naturally define a remarkable class of genuinely multipartite highly entangled states called $k$-uniform, i.e. multipartite pure states such that every reduction to $k$ parties is maximally mixed. We derive infinitely many classes of mutually orthogonal quantum Latin arrangements and quantum orthogonal arrays having an arbitrary large number of columns. The corresponding multipartite $k$-uniform states exhibit a high persistency of entanglement, which makes them ideal candidates to develop multipartite quantum information protocols.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures. Comments are very welcome

Discrete phase-space approach to mutually orthogonal Latin squares

We show there is a natural connection between Latin squares and commutative sets of monomials defining geometric structures in finite phase-space of prime power dimensions. A complete set of such monomials defines a mutually unbiased basis (MUB) and may be associated with a complete set of mutually orthogonal Latin squares (MOLS). We translate some possible operations on the monomial sets into isomorphisms of Latin squares, and find a general form of permutations that map between Latin squares corresponding to unitarily equivalent mutually unbiased sets. We extend this result to a conjecture: MOLS associated to unitarily equivalent MUBs will always be isomorphic, and MOLS associated to unitarily inequivalent MUBs will be non-isomorphic