Circle of a sphere the Equator the only great circle. By contrast, all meridians of longitude, paired with their opposite meridian in the other hemisphere, form great circles. The diameter of the sphere which passes through the center of the circle is called its axis and the endpoints of this diameter are called its poles. A circle of a sphere can also be defined as the set of points at a given angular distance from a given pole. When the intersection of a sphere and a plane is not empty or a single point, it is a circle. This can be seen as follows:
Bloch sphere sphere is also known as the Poincaré sphere and specifically represents different types of polarizations. Six common polarization types exist and are called Jones Vectors. Indeed Henri Poincaré was the first to suggest the use of this kind of geometrical representation at the end of 19th century, as a three-dimensional representation of Stokes parameters. The natural metric on the Bloch sphere is the Fubini–Study metric. The mapping from the unit 3-sphere in the two-dimensional state space ℂ to the Bloch sphere is the Hopf fibration. Given an orthonormal basis, any pure state formula_3 of a two-level quantum system can be