Clifford orbits and stabilizer states

Abstract Stabilizer states serve as ‘classical objects’ in the stabilizer formalism of quantum theory, and play an important role in quantum error correction, fault-tolerant quantum computation, and quantum communication. They provide an efficient description of many basic features of quantum theory and exhibit a rich structure. For prime dimensional systems, they may be defined by two quite different yet equivalent ways: The first is via stabilizer groups (maximal Abelian subgroups of the discrete Heisenberg–Weyl group). The second is via the orbits of the Clifford group acting on any computational basis state. However, in a general dimensional system, this equivalence breaks down, and consequently, it is desirable to clarify the difference and relation between the above two approaches to stabilizer states. In this work, we show that these two approaches are equivalent if and only if the system dimension is square-free (i.e. has no square factor). Furthermore, we completely reveal the relation between the Clifford orbits and stabilizer states in an arbitrary dimensional system, derive the explicit expressions of the Clifford orbits and determine their cardinalities.