Every equi-isoclinic tight fusion frame (EITFF) is a type of optimal code in a Grassmannian, consisting of subspaces of a finite-dimensional Hilbert space for which the smallest principal angle between any pair of them is as large as possible. EITFFs yield dictionaries with minimal block coherence and so are ideal for certain types of compressed sensing. By refining classical work of Lemmens and Seidel based on Radon-Hurwitz theory, we fully characterize EITFFs in the special case where the dimension of the subspaces is exactly one-half of that of the ambient space. We moreover show that each such “Radon-Hurwitz EITFF” is highly symmetric, where every even permutation is an automorphism.

Consider the fundamental problem of arranging r-dimensional subspaces of Rdin such a way that maximizes the minimum distance between unit vectors in different subspaces. It is well known that equi-isoclinic tight fusion frames (EITFFs) are optimal for this packing problem, but such ensembles are notoriously hard to construct. In this paper, we present a novel construction of EITFFs that are totally symmetric: any permutation of the subspaces can be realized by an orthogonal transformation of ℝd.