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

Genuinely multipartite entangled states and orthogonal arrays

A pure quantum state of N subsystems with d levels each is called k-multipartite maximally entangled state, written k-uniform, if all its reductions to k qudits are maximally mixed. These states form a natural generalization of N-qudits GHZ states which belong to the class 1-uniform states. We establish a link between the combinatorial notion of orthogonal arrays and k-uniform states and prove the existence of several new classes of such states for N-qudit systems. In particular, known Hadamard matrices allow us to explicitly construct 2-uniform states for an arbitrary number of N>5 qubits. We show that finding a different class of 2-uniform states would imply the Hadamard conjecture, so the full classification of 2-uniform states seems to be currently out of reach. Additionally, single vectors of another class of 2-uniform states are one-to-one related to maximal sets of mutually unbiased bases. Furthermore, we establish links between existence of k-uniform states, classical and quantum error correction codes and provide a novel graph representation for such states.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures. Comments are very welcome

Quantum correlations in nanostructured two-impurity Kondo systems

We study the ground-state entanglement properties of nanostructured Kondo systems consisting of a pair of impurity spins coupled to a background of confined electrons. The competition between the RKKY-like coupling and the Kondo effect determines the development of quantum correlations between the different parts of the system. A key element is the electronic filling due to confinement. An even electronic filling leads to results similar to those found previously for extended systems, where the properties of the reduced impurity-spin subsystem are uniquely determined by the spin correlation function defining a one-dimensional phase space. An odd filling, instead, breaks spin-rotation symmetry unfolding a two-dimensional phase space showing rich entanglement characteristics as, e.g., the requirement of a larger amount of entanglement for the development of non-local correlations between impurity spins. We check these results by numerical simulations of elliptic quantum corrals with magnetic impurities at the foci as a case study.Comment: Submitted for publication. 8 pages, 4 figures. Revised versio

A reduced basis method for frictional contact problems formulated with Nitsche's method

We develop an efficient reduced basis method for the frictional contact problem formulated using Nitsche's method. We focus on the regime of small deformations and on Tresca friction. The key idea ensuring the computational efficiency of the method is to treat the nonlinearity resulting from the contact and friction conditions by means of the Empirical Interpolation Method. The proposed algorithm is applied to the Hertz contact problem between two half-disks with parameter-dependent radius. We also highlight the benefits of the present approach with respect to the mixed (primal-dual) formulation

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