Transversal gates of the ((3,3,2)) qutrit code and local symmetries of the absolutely maximally entangled state of four qutrits

The group of transversal gates and the group of local symmetries are important features of quantum error correcting codes and pure quantum states, respectively; the former provides fault-tolerant operations on a code while the latter tells us about a state’s reachability via stochastic local operations with classical communication. We prove that there exists a bijection between local unitary (LU) orbits of absolutely maximally entangled (AME) states in $$(\mathbb {C}^D)^{\otimes n}$$ where n is even, also known as perfect tensors, and LU orbits of $$((n-1,D,n/2))_D$$ quantum error correcting codes. Furthermore, there is a close connection between the local symmetries of an AME state and the transversal gates of its corresponding quantum error correcting code. We explore in detail the 4-qutrit AME state $$|\Phi \rangle $$ and its corresponding $$((3,3,2))_3$$ qutrit code $$\mathcal {C}$$ . We show that $$|\Phi \rangle $$ and $$\mathcal {C}$$ are both unique up to the action of the LU group. We find generators of the local symmetry group of $$|\Phi \rangle $$ and the group of transversal gates on $$\mathcal {C}$$ . Our proofs rely on prior results by Huber and Grassl (2020), Hebenstreit et al. (2016), and Rather et al. (2023). We use Vinberg’s theory of Lie algebras to study the special case of $$|\Phi \rangle $$ and $$\mathcal {C}$$ .