  We consider the problem of switching off unwanted interactions in a given
multi-partite Hamiltonian. This is known to be an important primitive in
quantum information processing and several schemes have been presented in the
literature to achieve this task. A method to construct decoupling schemes for
quantum systems of pairwise interacting qubits was introduced by M.
Stollsteimer and G. Mahler and is based on orthogonal arrays. Another approach
based on triples of Hadamard matrices that are closed under pointwise
multiplication was proposed by D. Leung. In this paper, we show that both
methods lead to the same class of decoupling schemes. Moreover, we establish a
characterization of orthogonal arrays by showing that they are equivalent to
decoupling schemes which allow a refinement into equidistant time-slots.
Furthermore, we show that decoupling schemes for networks of higher-dimensional
quantum systems with t-local Hamiltonians can be constructed from classical
error-correcting codes.
