Almost Perfect Mutually Unbiased Bases that are Sparse

In dimension $d$, Mutually Unbiased Bases (MUBs) are a collection of orthonormal bases over $\mathbb{C}^d$ such that for any two vectors $v_1, v_2$ belonging to different bases, the dot or scalar product $|\braket{v_1|v_2}| = \frac{1}{\sqrt{d}}$. The upper bound on the number of such bases is $d+1$. Construction methods to achieve this bound are known for cases when $d$ is some power of prime. The situation is more restrictive in other cases and also when we consider the results over real rather than complex. Thus, certain relaxations of this model are considered in literature and consequently Approximate MUBs (AMUB) are studied. This enables one to construct potentially large number of such objects for $\mathbb{C}^d$ as well as in $\mathbb{R}^d$. In this regard, we propose the concept of Almost Perfect MUBs (APMUB), where we restrict the absolute value of inner product $|\braket{v_1|v_2}|$ to be two-valued, one being 0 and the other $ \leq \frac{1+\mathcal{O}(d^{-\lambda})}{\sqrt{d}}$, such that $\lambda > 0$ and the numerator $1 + \mathcal{O}(d^{-\lambda}) \leq 2$. Each such vector constructed, has an important feature that large number of its components are zero and the non-zero components are of equal magnitude. Our techniques are based on combinatorial structures related to Resolvable Block Designs (RBDs). We show that for several composite dimensions $d$, one can construct $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{d})$ many APMUBs, in which cases the number of MUBs are significantly small. To be specific, this result works for $d$ of the form $(q-e)(q+f), \ q, e, f \in \mathbb{N}$, with the conditions $0 \leq f \leq e$ for constant $e, f$ and $q$ some power of prime. We also show that such APMUBs provide sets of Bi-angular vectors which are of the order of $\mathcal{O}(d^{3/2})$ in numbers, having high angular distances among them.