On the rigidity of geometric and spectral properties of Grassmannian frames

We study the rigidity properties of Grassmannian frames: basis-like sets of unit vectors that correspond to optimal Grassmannian line packings. It is known that Grassmannian frames characterized by the Welch bound must satisfy the restrictive geometric and spectral conditions of being both equiangular and tight; however, less is known about the necessary properties of other types of Grassmannian frames. We examine explicit low-dimensional examples of orthoplectic Grassmannian frames and conclude that, in general, the necessary conditions for the existence of Grassmannian frames can be much less restrictive. In particular, we exhibit a pair of $5$-element Grassmannian frames in $\mathbb C^2$ manifesting with differently sized angle sets and different reconstructive properties (ie, only one of them is a tight frame). This illustrates the complexity of the line packing problem, as there are cases where a solution may coexist with another solution of a different geometric and spectral character. Nevertheless, we find that these "twin" instances still respect a certain rigidity, as there is a necessary trade-off between their tightness properties and the cardinalities of their angle sets. The proof of this depends on the observation that the traceless embedding of Conway, Hardin and Sloane sends the vectors of a unit-norm, tight frame to a zero-summing set on a higher dimensional sphere. In addition, we review some of the known bounds for characterizing optimal line packings in $\mathbb C^2$ and discuss several examples of Grassmannian frames achieving them.