On orthostochastic, unistochastic and qustochastic matrices

Abstract

We introduce qustochastic matrices as the bistochastic matrices arising from quaternionic unitary matrices by replacing each entry with the square of its norm. This is the quaternionic analogue of the unistochastic matrices studied by physicists. We also introduce quaternionic Hadamard matrices and quaternionic mutually unbiased bases (MUB). In particular we show that the number of MUB in an n-dimensional quaternionic Hilbert space is at most 2n+1. The bound is attained for n=2. We also determine all quaternionic Hadamard matrices of size at most 4.