Linear Programming Bounds on $k$-Uniform States

Abstract: The existence of $k$-uniform states has been a widely studied problem due to their applications in several quantum information tasks and their close relation to combinatorial objects like Latin squares and orthogonal arrays. With the machinery of quantum enumerators and linear programming, we establish several improved non-existence results and bounds on $k$-uniform states. 1. First, for any fixed $l\geq 1$ and $q\geq 2$, we show that there exists a constant $c$ such that $(\left\lfloor{n/2}\right\rfloor-l)$-uniform states in $(\mathbb{C}^q)^{\otimes n}$ do not exist when $n\geq cq^2+o(q^2)$. The constant $c$ equals $4$ when $l=1$ and $6$ when $l=2$, which generalizes Scott's bound (2004) for $l=0$. 2. Second, when $n$ is sufficiently large, we show that there exists a constant $\theta<1/2$ for each $q \le 9$, such that $k$-uniform states in $(\mathbb{C}^q)^{\otimes n}$ exist only when $k\leq \theta n$. In particular, this provides the first bound (to the best of our knowledge) of $k$ for $4\leq q\leq 9$ and confirms a conjecture posed by Shi et al. (2023) when $q=5$ in a stronger form. 3. Finally, we improve the shadow bounds given by Shi et al. (2023) by a constant for $q = 3,4,5$ and small $n$. When $q=4$, our results can update some bounds listed in the code tables maintained by Grassl (2007--2024).