Planar Difference Functions
  In 1980 Alltop produced a family of cubic phase sequences that nearly meet the Welch bound for maximum non-peak correlation magnitude. This family of sequences were shown by Wooters and Fields to be useful for quantum state tomography. Alltop's construction used a function that is not planar, but whose difference function is planar. In this paper we show that Alltop type functions cannot exist in fields of characteristic 3 and that for a known class of planar functions, $x^3$ is the only Alltop type function. 
Joanne L. Hall, Asha Rao, and Diane Donovan
math.CO cs.IT math.IT quant-ph