Towards a Classification of 6 × 6 Complex Hadamard Matrices

Complex Hadamard matrices have received considerable attention in the past few years due to their application in quantum information theory. While a complete characterization currently available [5] is only up to order 5, several new constructions of higher order matrices have appeared recently [4, 12, 2, 7, 11]. In particular, the classification of self-adjoint complex Hadamard matrices of order 6 was completed by Beuachamp and Nicoara in [2], providing a previously unknown non-affine one-parameter orbit. In this paper we classify all dephased, symmetric complex Hadamard matrices with real diagonal of order 6. Furthermore, relaxing the condition on the diagonal entries we obtain a new non-affine one-parameter orbit connecting the Fourier matrix F6 and Diţă's matrix D6. This answers a recent question of Bengtsson et al. [3].