Quamtumness, Generalized Spherical 2-Design and Symmetric Informationally Complete POVM

Abstract

C. A. Fuchs and M. Sasaki defined the quantumness of a set of quantum states in \cite{Quantumness}, which is closely related to the fidelity loss in transmission of the quantum states through a classical channel. In \cite{Fuchs}, Fuchs showed that in $d$-dimensional Hilbert space, minimum quantumness is $\frac{2}{d+1}$, and this can be achieved by all rays in the space. He left an open problem, asking whether fewer than $d^2$ states can achieve this bound. Recently, in a different context, A. J. Scott introduced a concept of generalized $t$-design in \cite{GenSphet}, which is a natural generalization of spherical $t$-design. In this paper, we show that the lower bound on the quantumness can be achieved if and only if the states form a generalized 2-design. As a corollary, we show that this bound can be only achieved if the number of states are larger or equal to $d^2$, answering the open problem. Furthermore, we also show that the minimal set of such ensemble is Symmetric Informationally Complete POVM(SIC-POVM). This leads to an equivalence relation between SIC-POVM and minimal set of ensemble achieving minimal quantumness.