Bell states, mutually unbiased bases and the Mean King's problem

Abstract

When the state of a quantum system belongs to a N-dimensional Hilbert space, with N the power of a prime number, it is possible to associate to the system a finite field (Galois field) with N elements. In this paper, we introduce generalized Bell states that can be intrinsically expressed in terms of the field operations.These Bell states are in one to one correspondence with the N^2 elements of the generalised Pauli group or Heisenberg-Weyl group. This group consists of discrete displacement operators and provides a discrete realisation of the Weyl function.Thanks to the properties of generalised Bell states and of quadratic extensions of finite fields, we derive a particular solution for the Mean King's problem. This solution is in turn shown to be in one to one correspondence with a set of N^2 self-adjoint operators that provides a discrete realisation of the Wigner quasi-distribution.