Projective toric designs, quantum state designs, and mutually unbiased bases

Trigonometric cubature rules of degree t are sets of points on the torus over which sums reproduce integrals of degree t monomials over the full torus. They can be thought of as t-designs on the torus, or equivalently t-designs on the diagonal subgroup of the unitary group. Motivated by the projective structure of quantum mechanics, we develop the notion of t-designs on the projective torus, which, surprisingly, have a much more restricted structure than their counterparts on full tori. We provide various new constructions of toric and projective toric designs and prove bounds on their size. We draw connections between projective toric designs and a diverse set of mathematical objects, including difference and Sidon sets from the field of additive combinatorics, symmetric, informationally complete positive operator valued measures (SIC-POVMs) and complete sets of mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) from quantum information theory, and crystal ball sequences of certain root lattices. Using these connections, we prove bounds on the maximal size of dense Bt mod m sets. We also use projective toric designs to construct families of quantum state designs. In particular, we construct families of (uniformly-weighted) quantum state 2-designs in dimension d of size exactly d(d + 1) that do not form complete sets of MUBs, thereby disproving a conjecture concerning the relationship between designs and MUBs (Zhu 2015, Phys. Rev. A 91, 060301). We then propose a modification of Zhu's conjecture and discuss potential paths towards proving this conjecture. We prove a fundamental distinction between complete sets of MUBs in prime-power dimensions versus in dimension 6 (and, we conjecture, in all non-prime-power dimensions), the distinction relating to group structure of the corresponding projective toric design. Finally, we discuss many open questions about the properties of these projective toric designs and how they relate to other questions in number theory, geometry, and quantum information.