Symmetries of weight enumerators and applications to Reed-Muller codes

Gleason's 1970 theorem on weight enumerators of self-dual codes has played a crucial role for research in coding theory during the last four decades. Plenty of generalizations have been proved but, to our knowledge, they are all based on the symmetries given by MacWilliams' identities. This paper is intended to be a first step towards a more general investigation of symmetries of weight enumerators. We list the possible groups of symmetries, dealing both with the finite and infinite case, we develop a new algorithm to compute the group of symmetries of a given weight enumerator and apply these methods to the family of Reed-Muller codes, giving, in the binary case, an analogue of Gleason's theorem for all parameters.Comment: 14 pages. Improved and extended version of arXiv:1511.00803. To appear in Advances in Mathematics of Communication

Self-Dual Codes

Self-dual codes are important because many of the best codes known are of this type and they have a rich mathematical theory. Topics covered in this survey include codes over F_2, F_3, F_4, F_q, Z_4, Z_m, shadow codes, weight enumerators, Gleason-Pierce theorem, invariant theory, Gleason theorems, bounds, mass formulae, enumeration, extremal codes, open problems. There is a comprehensive bibliography.Comment: 136 page

Some new results on the self-dual [120,60,24] code

The existence of an extremal self-dual binary linear code of length 120 is a long-standing open problem. We continue the investigation of its automorphism group, proving that automorphisms of order 30 and 57 cannot occur. Supposing the involutions acting fixed point freely, we show that also automorphisms of order 8 cannot occur and the automorphism group is of order at most 120, with further restrictions. Finally, we present some necessary conditions for the existence of the code, based on shadow and design theory.Comment: 23 pages, 6 tables, to appear in Finite Fields and Their Application

Construction of isodual codes from polycirculant matrices

Double polycirculant codes are introduced here as a generalization of double circulant codes. When the matrix of the polyshift is a companion matrix of a trinomial, we show that such a code is isodual, hence formally self-dual. Numerical examples show that the codes constructed have optimal or quasi-optimal parameters amongst formally self-dual codes. Self-duality, the trivial case of isoduality, can only occur over \F_2 in the double circulant case. Building on an explicit infinite sequence of irreducible trinomials over \F_2, we show that binary double polycirculant codes are asymptotically good