A characterization of MDS codes that have an error correcting pair

Error-correcting pairs were introduced in 1988 by R. Pellikaan, and were found independently by R. K\"otter (1992), as a general algebraic method of decoding linear codes. These pairs exist for several classes of codes. However little or no study has been made for characterizing those codes. This article is an attempt to fill the vacuum left by the literature concerning this subject. Since every linear code is contained in an MDS code of the same minimum distance over some finite field extension we have focused our study on the class of MDS codes. Our main result states that an MDS code of minimum distance $2t+1$ has a $t$-ECP if and only if it is a generalized Reed-Solomon code. A second proof is given using recent results Mirandola and Z\'emor (2015) on the Schur product of codes

On MDS Negacyclic LCD Codes

Linear codes with complementary duals (LCD) have a great deal of significance amongst linear codes. Maximum distance separable (MDS) codes are also an important class of linear codes since they achieve the greatest error correcting and detecting capabilities for fixed length and dimension. The construction of linear codes that are both LCD and MDS is a hard task in coding theory. In this paper, we study the constructions of LCD codes that are MDS from negacyclic codes over finite fields of odd prime power $q$ elements. We construct four families of MDS negacyclic LCD codes of length $n|\frac{{q-1}}{2}$, $n|\frac{{q+1}}{2}$ and a family of negacyclic LCD codes of length $n=q-1$. Furthermore, we obtain five families of $q^{2}$-ary Hermitian MDS negacyclic LCD codes of length $n|\left( q-1\right)$ and four families of Hermitian negacyclic LCD codes of length $n=q^{2}+1.$ For both Euclidean and Hermitian cases the dimensions of these codes are determined and for some classes the minimum distances are settled. For the other cases, by studying $q$ and $q^{2}$-cyclotomic classes we give lower bounds on the minimum distance

Squares of matrix-product codes

The component-wise or Schur product $C*C'$ of two linear error-correcting codes $C$ and $C'$ over certain finite field is the linear code spanned by all component-wise products of a codeword in $C$ with a codeword in $C'$. When $C=C'$, we call the product the square of $C$ and denote it $C^{*2}$. Motivated by several applications of squares of linear codes in the area of cryptography, in this paper we study squares of so-called matrix-product codes, a general construction that allows to obtain new longer codes from several ``constituent'' codes. We show that in many cases we can relate the square of a matrix-product code to the squares and products of their constituent codes, which allow us to give bounds or even determine its minimum distance. We consider the well-known $(u,u+v)$-construction, or Plotkin sum (which is a special case of a matrix-product code) and determine which parameters we can obtain when the constituent codes are certain cyclic codes. In addition, we use the same techniques to study the squares of other matrix-product codes, for example when the defining matrix is Vandermonde (where the minimum distance is in a certain sense maximal with respect to matrix-product codes).This work is supported by the Danish Council for IndependentResearch: grant DFF-4002-00367, theSpanish Ministry of Economy/FEDER: grant RYC-2016-20208 (AEI/FSE/UE), the Spanish Ministry of Science/FEDER: grant PGC2018-096446-B-C21, and Junta de CyL (Spain): grant VA166G

Classical and Quantum Evaluation Codesat the Trace Roots

We introduce a new class of evaluation linear codes by evaluating polynomials at the roots of a suitable trace function. We give conditions for self-orthogonality of these codes and their subfield-subcodes with respect to the Hermitian inner product. They allow us to construct stabilizer quantum codes over several finite fields which substantially improve the codes in the literature. For the binary case, we obtain records at http://codetables.de/. Moreover, we obtain several classical linear codes over the field F 4 which are records at http://codetables.de/