Artin-Schreier families and 2-D cycle codes

We start with the study of certain Artin-Schreier families. Using coding theory techniques, we determine a necessary and sufficient condition for such families to have a nontrivial curve with the maximum possible number of rational points over the finite field in consideration. This result produces several nice corollaries, including the existence of certain maximal curves; i.e., curves meeting the Hasse-Weil bound.We then present a way to represent two-dimensional (2-D) cyclic codes as trace codes starting from a basic zero set of its dual code. This representation enables us to relate the weight of a codeword to the number of rational points on certain Artin-Schreier curves via the additive form of Hilbert’s Theorem 90. We use our results on Artin-Schreier families to give a minimum distance bound for a large class of 2-D cyclic codes. Then, we look at some specific classes of 2-D cyclic codes that are not covered by our general result. In one case, we obtain the complete weight enumerator and show that these types of codes have two nonzero weights. In the other cases, we again give minimum distance bounds. We present examples, in some of which our estimates are fairly effcient

Subspace subcodes of Reed-Solomon codes

We introduce a class of nonlinear cyclic error-correcting codes, which we call subspace subcodes of Reed-Solomon (SSRS) codes. An SSRS code is a subset of a parent Reed-Solomon (RS) code consisting of the RS codewords whose components all lie in a fixed ν-dimensional vector subspace S of GF (2m). SSRS codes are constructed using properties of the Galois field GF(2m). They are not linear over the field GF(2ν), which does not come into play, but rather are Abelian group codes over S. However, they are linear over GF(2), and the symbol-wise cyclic shift of any codeword is also a codeword. Our main result is an explicit but complicated formula for the dimension of an SSRS code. It implies a simple lower bound, which gives the true value of the dimension for most, though not all, subspaces. We also prove several important duality properties. We present some numerical examples, which show, among other things, that (1) SSRS codes can have a higher dimension than comparable subfield subcodes of RS codes, so that even if GF(2ν) is a subfield of GF(2m), it may not be the best ν-dimensional subspace for constructing SSRS codes; and (2) many high-rate SSRS codes have a larger dimension than any previously known code with the same values of n, d, and q, including algebraic-geometry codes. These examples suggest that high-rate SSRS codes are promising candidates to replace Reed-Solomon codes in high-performance transmission and storage systems

Asymptotically Good Additive Cyclic Codes Exist

Long quasi-cyclic codes of any fixed index $>1$ have been shown to be asymptotically good, depending on Artin primitive root conjecture in (A. Alahmadi, C. G\"uneri, H. Shoaib, P. Sol\'e, 2017). We use this recent result to construct good long additive cyclic codes on any extension of fixed degree of the base field. Similarly self-dual double circulant codes, and self-dual four circulant codes, have been shown to be good, also depending on Artin primitive root conjecture in (A. Alahmadi, F. \"Ozdemir, P. Sol\'e, 2017) and ( M. Shi, H. Zhu, P. Sol\'e, 2017) respectively. Building on these recent results, we can show that long cyclic codes are good over \F_q, for many classes of $q$'s. This is a partial solution to a fifty year old open problem

Towers of Function Fields over Non-prime Finite Fields

Over all non-prime finite fields, we construct some recursive towers of function fields with many rational places. Thus we obtain a substantial improvement on all known lower bounds for Ihara's quantity $A(\ell)$, for $\ell = p^n$ with $p$ prime and $n>3$ odd. We relate the explicit equations to Drinfeld modular varieties

On additive cyclic codes

In this thesis we consider two problems related to additive cyclic codes. In the first part, we obtain a lower bound on the minimum distance of additive cyclic codes via the number of rational points on certain algebraic curves over finite fields. This is an extension of the analogous bound for classical cyclic codes. Our result is the only general bound on such codes aside from Bierbrauer's BCH bound. We compare our bound's performance against the BCH bound for additive cyclic codes in a special case and provide examples where it yields better results. In the second part, we study complementary dual additive cyclic codes. We give a suficient condition for a special class of additive cyclic codes to be complementary dual