Minimum orbit dimension for local unitary action on n-qubit pure states

David W. Lyons, Scott N. Walck

Published 2005-03-04, updated 2005-10-18Version 2

The group of local unitary transformations partitions the space of n-qubit quantum states into orbits, each of which is a differentiable manifold of some dimension. We prove that all orbits of the n-qubit quantum state space have dimension greater than or equal to 3n/2 for n even and greater than or equal to (3n + 1)/2 for n odd. This lower bound on orbit dimension is sharp, since n-qubit states composed of products of singlets achieve these lowest orbit dimensions.