Steiner equiangular tight frames (Q665926)

This paper presents a construction principle for families of equiangular tight frames. These families of vectors in finite-dimensional real or complex Hilbert spaces have desirable properties for representing vectors in terms of their frame coefficients: Up to an overall multiplicative constant, the map from a vector to its frame coefficients, its inner products with the frame vectors, is an isometry; the norms of the frame vectors are equal and the inner product of any pair of vectors is a fixed constant. The interplay between these requirements has given rise to many papers on possible construction methods, including fundamental combinatorial techniques by Seidel and collaborators. The present paper builds on Seidel's insight that equiangular tight frames are in the real case representatives of switching equivalence classes [\textit{J. J. Seidel}, in: Colloq. int. Teorie comb., Roma 1973, Tomo I, 481--511 (1976; Zbl 0352.05016)]. These switching equivalence classes can be identified with regular two-graphs. The paper demonstrates that the construction of regular two-graphs is related to a type of Steiner system, and that this relationship and the associated construction method generalize painlessly to the complex case. An additional topic that is examined is the question whether equiangular tight frames are good candidates for matrices with the restricted isometry property, or whether they have an intrinsic scaling property as in the construction by \textit{R. A. DeVore} [J. Complexity 23, No. 4--6, 918--925 (2007; Zbl 1134.94312)] that makes them inferior to random families. At least for the type of frames examined here it turns out that the usual estimates for the restricted isometry constant cannot be improved further. This implies that equiangular tight frames constructed with Steiner systems are inferior to randomized constructions or to the recent deterministic construction by [\textit{J. Bourgain, S. Dilworth, K. Ford, S. Konyagin} and \textit{D. Kutzarova}, Duke Math. J. 159, No. 1, 145--185 (2011; Zbl 1236.94027)]. This leaves the question open whether there are other construction principles for equiangular tight frames that lead to better restricted isometry constants.