Generalized Bell basis 2026-10-07
For a primitive root of unity and labels modulo , the displayed maximally entangled states form an orthonormal basis. Inner products equal , by the geometric series. A nonprimitive root repeats phase labels and does not give a complete orthonormal basis.
The root must be a primitive th root of unity, for example . The printed statement merely says th root; that is insufficient. With and , the states with and coincide. More generally, a root of order repeats the labels modulo . For the construction is trivial.
For a primitive root of unity, the generalized Bell basis obeys
The last equality follows from the finite geometric series: a nonzero exponent difference modulo has sum zero, while zero difference has sum . There are orthonormal vectors in an -dimensional Hilbert space, so they form a complete basis.
For qudit teleportation, Alice's input is . Alice and Bob share . Define the qudit shift and phase operators by and . Alice measures in the generalized Bell basis. On outcome , Bob's unnormalized state is
All outcomes have probability . Alice communicates and Bob applies
which restores exactly. The protocol consumes one maximally entangled pair of -level systems, a local -outcome measurement, and a classical message with possibilities. For a fixed-length binary encoding, bits suffice. No measurement depends on the unknown amplitudes.
Let be a splitting field of over . Its formal derivative is
The assumption on the characteristic of says that in . Any root of is nonzero, and hence . Thus and have no common root, so is a separable polynomial. Since it has degree and splits over , it has exactly distinct roots. This is the separability of roots of unity.
Fix a primitive root of unity . Define the th cyclotomic polynomial by
It is monic and has degree given by the Euler totient function . Partitioning all th roots of unity according to their exact multiplicative order gives the cyclotomic factorization
We now prove by mathematical induction that . The base case is . If the result holds for every proper divisor of , then
is monic and belongs to . Polynomial division of by the monic integer polynomial produces a quotient and remainder in . The factorization over says that the remainder is zero and the quotient is , proving the claim.
It remains to prove irreducibility of cyclotomic polynomials. Let be a monic irreducible polynomial dividing , let be a root of , and write . We claim that is a root of for every prime number . Otherwise is a root of , so is a root of . Since is the minimal polynomial of over , Gauss lemma for polynomials gives
After reduction of an integer polynomial modulo a prime, the Frobenius endomorphism gives
Choose an irreducible factor of the nonconstant monic polynomial . Then , so . The cyclotomic factorization would then make divide over . This is impossible because its derivative is coprime to it when .
Thus for every prime . Iterating this fact over a prime factorization shows that whenever . These are all primitive th roots, so
Because divides , equality holds and . Hence every cyclotomic polynomial is irreducible over .
Finally, direct multiplication gives
Also
Applying the cyclotomic factorization to the two factors on the right gives
and therefore
Since , cancellation yields
The thirtieth cyclotomic polynomial is irreducible over by the theorem just proved, so is irreducible.
Let with . Then
and these elements are distinct because is a primitive root of unity. Thus the stabilizer of in the cyclic Galois group is trivial. The orbit-stabilizer form of the Fundamental theorem of Galois theory gives
so
Moreover,
The fixed field of the whole Galois group is , and therefore
This is the basic eigenvector mechanism behind a cyclic Kummer extension.
The automorphisms are distinct and hence linearly independent as maps by the linear independence of distinct field embeddings. Therefore the operator
is not the zero map. Choose for which . Reindexing the sum and using gives
This is the Lagrange resolvent eigenvector for a cyclic field automorphism.
Let be the fixed field. Since , the element is a root of
Its orbit under is
and these elements are distinct because and is a primitive root of unity. Hence the minimal polynomial has at least distinct roots. It also divides the displayed degree- polynomial, so
Let be primitive and let be the finite subgroup of that they generate. By part a, is cyclic. Its order is divisible by both and , hence by . On the other hand every element of has th power one, so the order of the cyclic group divides . Its order is therefore exactly , and a generator of is a primitive th root of unity in .
Assume that is a primitive fifth root of unity. The cyclotomic field has degree four and signature . The Dirichlet unit theorem therefore gives free rank
The roots of unity in a rational cyclotomic field are the ten elements , so
For explicit units, has order ten, while
Hence is a unit. It has infinite order because in the standard complex embedding
whereas every root of unity has modulus one. Its image in the free factor is therefore nonzero and generates a finite-index subgroup of that factor. Consequently
has finite index in , as described by the unit group of the fifth cyclotomic field.
For an -level qudit and primitive root of unity , these unitary operators obey and . The inverse of is , with the order reversed. These operators implement the receiver corrections in qudit teleportation.