Distinguished three-qubit 'magicity' via automorphisms of the split Cayley hexagon

Disregarding the identity, the remaining 63 elements of the generalized three-qubit Pauli group are found to contain 12 096 distinct copies of Mermin’s magic pentagram. Remarkably, 12 096 is also the number of automorphisms of the smallest split Cayley hexagon. We give a few solid arguments showing that this may not be a mere coincidence. These arguments are mainly tied to the structure of certain types of geometric hyperplanes of the hexagon. It is further demonstrated that also an (182, 123)-type of magic configurations, recently proposed by Waegell and Aravind (J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 45 (2012) 405301), seems to be intricately linked with automorphisms of the hexagon. Finally, the entanglement properties exhibited by edges of both pentagrams and these particular Waegell-Aravind configurations are addressed. PACS numbers: 03.65.Aa, 03.65.Fd, 03.65.Ud, 02.10.Ox