Isolated partial Hadamard matrices, and related topics

We study the isolated partial Hadamard matrices, under the assumption that the entries are roots of unity, or more generally, under the assumption that the combinatorics comes from vanishing sums of roots of unity. We first review the various conjectures on the subject, and then we present several new results, regarding notably the master Hadamard matrices, and the McNulty-Weigert construction. We discuss then the notion of isolation in some related contexts, of the magic unitary matrices, and of the quantum permutation groups, with a number of conjectures on the subject.