  Physical constraints such as positivity endow the set of quantum states with
a rich geometry if the system dimension is greater than two. To shed some light
on the complicated structure of the set of quantum states, we consider a
stratification with strata given by unitary orbit manifolds, which can be
identified with flag manifolds. The results are applied to study the geometry
of the coherence vector for n-level quantum systems. It is shown that the
unitary orbits can be naturally identified with spheres in R^{n^2-1} only for
n=2. In higher dimensions the coherence vector only defines a non-surjective
embedding into a closed ball. A detailed analysis of the three-level case is
presented. Finally, a refined stratification in terms of symplectic orbits is
considered.
