Generalized spin bases for quantum chemistry and quantum information

Dedicated to Professor Rudolf Zahradnik on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Invited paper to be published in Collection of Czechoslovak Chemical CommunicationsSymmetry adapted bases in quantum chemistry and bases adapted to quantum information share a common characteristics: both of them are constructed from subspaces of the representation space of the group SO(3) or its double group (i.e., spinor group) SU(2). We exploit this fact for generating spin bases of relevance for quantum systems with cyclic symmetry and equally well for quantum information and quantum computation. Our approach is based on the use of generalized Pauli matrices arising from a polar decomposition of SU(2). This approach leads to a complete solution for the construction of mutually unbiased bases in the case where the dimension d of the considered Hilbert subspace is a prime number. We also give the starting point for studying the case where d is the power of a prime number. A connection of this work with the unitary group U(d) and the Pauli group is brielly underlined