Why two qubits are special

We analyze some special properties of a system of two qubits, and in particular of the so-called Bell basis for this system, and discuss the possibility of extending these properties to higher dimensional systems. We give a general construction for orthonormal bases of maximally entangled vectors, which works in any dimension, and is based on Latin squares and complex Hadamard matrices. However, for none of these bases the special properties of the operation of complex conjugation in Bell basis hold, namely that maximally entangled vectors have up-to-a-phase real coefficients and that factorizable unitaries have real matrix elements. (C) 2000 American Institute of Physics. [S0022- 2488(00)03707-5].