Toward the classification of biangular harmonic frames (Q2415403)

The authors of the present paper recall some concepts related to frames in Hilbert spaces, such as tight frames, unit-norm frames, frame angles, frame angle multiplicities, equiangular frames, biangular frames, and equidistributed frames. Then, they review some concepts and results in group theory and character theory. They recall some facts about abelian groups, characters, dual groups, annihilator of a subgroup and quotient groups. After that, harmonic frames and modulation operators are considered and some results about them are stated. In Section 4, where the main results of the paper are obtained, the authors, using subsets of a group, define some concepts like nested difference set, proper nested difference set, difference set, bidifference set, proper bidifference set, divisible difference set, partial difference set, reversible set, regular set, Gaussian difference set, almost difference set, nested divisible difference set and present several examples and results for them. Especially, they show that if a harmonic frame is generated by a divisible difference set, a partial difference set or by a Gaussian difference set, then it is either a BTF (biangular tight frame) or an ETF (equiangular tight frame). Moreover, they present some examples of bidifference sets that do not generate biangular harmonic frames and conclude that the relationship between harmonic BTFs and bidifference sets is not as nice as the correspondence between harmonic ETFs and difference sets. Mainly, they focus on the study of nested divisible difference sets to give an example of a biangular harmonic frame that is not generated by a bidifference set.