A family of optimal packings in Grassmannian manifolds (Q1383812)

The authors study good packings in Grassmannian space, or, in other words, how to pack \(m\)-dimensional real Euclidean space with \(N\) \(n\)-dimensional subspaces such that these are as far apart as possible. This research was initiated by \textit{J. H. Conway, R. H. Hardin}, and \textit{N. J. A. Sloane} in Exp. Math. 5, No. 2, 139-159 (1996); editor's note ibid. 6, No. 2, 175 (1997; Zbl 0864.51012) where small cases are studied and bounds are derived. One of these bounds (Corollary 5.3) is called the orthoplex bound. For each \(m\) a power of two, the current paper gives a construction of a family of packings of \(m^2+m-2\) \(m/2\)-dimensional subspaces of \(m\)-dimensional Euclidean space that meet the orthoplex bound, and are therefore optimal. The construction was discovered by studying a family of subgroups of the real orthogonal group that are connected with quantum codes.