Equioverlapping measurements as extensions of symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measures
Lingxuan Feng, Shunlong Luo, Yan Zhao, Zhihua Guo
Abstract
Equioverlapping measurements, as a natural class of quantum measurements with the appealing property of equal overlap between any pair of measurement operators, generalize both the notions of equiangular tight frames (including von Neumann measurements) and symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measures (SIC-POVMs). The structures of equioverlapping measurements in general dimensions are rather subtle and complicated. In this work, we reveal some structural properties of equioverlapping measurements which may be useful for constructing and classifying equioverlapping measurements. In particular, we obtain two bounds for the number of measurement operators in an equioverlapping measurement. We further illustrate how equioverlapping measurements go beyond SIC-POVMs in a nontrivial fashion with some illuminating examples in lower dimensions (two, three, and four). Finally, we present the challenging problem of fully classifying equioverlapping measurements and discuss some related perspectives.