While working on Heisenberg-Weyl operators (specifically working on their eigenvalues), I have come across the following problem:
Given an $n$, $n$th roots of some complex number $p, |p| = 1$ sum to zero. Let $A$ be the set that contains all these $n$ roots. My intuition was if we form a subset of $A$ whose elements also sum to zero, then this subset is necessarily a complete set of $m$th roots of some $p'$, where $m$ is a factor of $n$. However, this intuition turned out to be wrong
see: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/490115/summation-of-roots-of-unity-equal-to-zero?rq=1