Geometry of the generalized Bloch sphere for qutrits 1 2 3 Sandeep K. Goyal ∗, B. Neethi Simon , Rajeev Singh † & Sudhavathani Simon4 1Institute for Quantum Science and Technology, University of Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada 2Department of Mechanical Engineering, SSN College of Engineering, SSN Nagar, OMR, Chennai 603 110, India 3The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Tharamani, Chennai 600 113 4Department of Computer Science, Women’s Christian College, Chennai 600 006, India E-mail: ∗
[email protected], †
[email protected] 22 March 2016 Abstract. The geometry of the generalized Bloch sphere Ω3, the state space of a qutrit, is studied. Closed form expressions for Ω3, its boundary ∂Ω3, and the set of ext extremals Ω3 are obtained by use of an elementary observation. These expressions and analytic methods are used to classify the 28 two-sections and the 56 three-sections of Ω3 into unitary equivalence classes, completing the works of earlier authors. It is shown, in particular, that there are families of two-sections and of three-sections which are equivalent geometrically but not unitarily, a feature that does not appear to have been appreciated earlier. A family of three-sections of obese-tetrahedral shape whose symmetry corresponds to the 24-element tetrahedral point group Td is examined in detail. This symmetry is traced to the natural reduction of the adjoint representation of SU(3), the symmetry underlying Ω3, into direct sum of the two-dimensional and the two (inequivalent) three-dimensional irreducible representations of Td. arXiv:1111.4427v2 [quant-ph] 21 Mar 2016 PACS numbers: 03.65.-w, 03.65.Ta, 03.65.Fd, 03.63.Vf Geometry of the generalized Bloch sphere for qutrits 2 1.