Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2009 / iii / Paper 52 / 2 / b / Solution

A density operator is Hermitian, positive semidefinite and has trace one. Part (a) therefore makes all its coordinates real, and the identity basis vector fixes the final coordinate:The remaining basis vectors are traceless by orthogonality to $I/\sqrt{N}$. The Generalized Bloch representation is consequentlyUsing orthonormality to expand the squared Hilbert-Schmidt norm gives the purity bound for generalized Bloch vectors:If $p_1,\dots ,p_N$ are its nonnegative eigenvalues, then ${\sum }_j{p}_j=1$ andIt follows thatEquality requires every pairwise product $p_j{p}_k$ to vanish, so exactly one eigenvalue equals one and all others are zero. Conversely, a rank-one projector has precisely that spectrum and attains equality. Thus equality holds exactly for a pure state. This normalization is different from the commonly used unit-radius qubit Bloch vector.