Continuous Association Schemes and Hypergroups

Classical finite association schemes lead to a finite-dimensional algebras which are generated by finitely many stochastic matrices. Moreover, there exist associated finite hypergroups. The notion of classical discrete association schemes can be easily extended to the possibly infinite case. Moreover, the notion of association schemes can be relaxed slightly by using suitably deformed families of stochastic matrices by skipping the integrality conditions. This leads to larger class of examples which are again associated to discrete hypergroups. In this paper we propose a topological generalization of the notion of association schemes by using a locally compact basis space $X$ and a family of Markov-kernels on $X$ indexed by a further locally compact space $D$ where the supports of the associated probability measures satisfy some partition property. These objects, called continuous association schemes, will be related to hypergroup structures on $D$. We study some basic results for this new notion and present several classes of examples. It turns out that for a given commutative hypergroup the existence of an associated continuous association scheme implies that the hypergroup has many features of a double coset hypergroup. We in particular show that commutative hypergroups, which are associated with commutative continuous association schemes, carry dual positive product formulas for the characters. On the other hand, we prove some rigidity results in particular in the compact case which say that for given spaces $X,D$ there are only a few continuous association schemes

Matroids and Quantum Secret Sharing Schemes

A secret sharing scheme is a cryptographic protocol to distribute a secret state in an encoded form among a group of players such that only authorized subsets of the players can reconstruct the secret. Classically, efficient secret sharing schemes have been shown to be induced by matroids. Furthermore, access structures of such schemes can be characterized by an excluded minor relation. No such relations are known for quantum secret sharing schemes. In this paper we take the first steps toward a matroidal characterization of quantum secret sharing schemes. In addition to providing a new perspective on quantum secret sharing schemes, this characterization has important benefits. While previous work has shown how to construct quantum secret sharing schemes for general access structures, these schemes are not claimed to be efficient. In this context the present results prove to be useful; they enable us to construct efficient quantum secret sharing schemes for many general access structures. More precisely, we show that an identically self-dual matroid that is representable over a finite field induces a pure state quantum secret sharing scheme with information rate one

Commutative association schemes

Association schemes were originally introduced by Bose and his co-workers in the design of statistical experiments. Since that point of inception, the concept has proved useful in the study of group actions, in algebraic graph theory, in algebraic coding theory, and in areas as far afield as knot theory and numerical integration. This branch of the theory, viewed in this collection of surveys as the "commutative case," has seen significant activity in the last few decades. The goal of the present survey is to discuss the most important new developments in several directions, including Gelfand pairs, cometric association schemes, Delsarte Theory, spin models and the semidefinite programming technique. The narrative follows a thread through this list of topics, this being the contrast between combinatorial symmetry and group-theoretic symmetry, culminating in Schrijver's SDP bound for binary codes (based on group actions) and its connection to the Terwilliger algebra (based on combinatorial symmetry). We propose this new role of the Terwilliger algebra in Delsarte Theory as a central topic for future work.Comment: 36 page

Coherent configurations and triply regular association schemes obtained from spherical designs

Delsarte-Goethals-Seidel showed that if $X$ is a spherical $t$-design with degree $s$ satisfying $t\geq 2s-2$, $X$ carries the structure of an association scheme. Also Bannai-Bannai showed that the same conclusion holds if $X$ is an antipodal spherical $t$-design with degree $s$ satisfying $t=2s-3$. As a generalization of these results, we prove that a union of spherical designs with a certain property carries the structure of a coherent configuration. We derive triple regularity of tight spherical $4,5,7$-designs, mutually unbiased bases, linked symmetric designs with certain parameters.Comment: 17page