Hermitian codes and complete intersections

TL;DR

This paper provides a geometric characterization of minimum-weight codewords in Hermitian codes over finite fields, linking algebraic curves and divisors to code properties, and proposes an algorithm for counting these codewords.

Contribution

It introduces a novel geometric framework for understanding minimum-weight codewords in Hermitian codes and develops an algorithm for their enumeration.

Findings

Characterization of minimum-weight codewords via complete intersection divisors.

Identification of specific algebraic curves associated with minimum-weight codewords.

An efficient algorithm for counting minimum-weight codewords, validated against MAGMA.

Abstract

In this paper we present a geometrical characterization for the minimum-weight codewords of the Hermitian codes over the fields $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$ in the third and fourth phase, namely with distance $d \geq q^2-q$. We consider the unique writing $\mu q + \lambda (q+1)$ of the distance $d$ with $\mu, \lambda$ non negative integers, and $\mu \leq q$, and prove that the minimum-weight codewords correspond to complete intersection divisors cut on the Hermitian curve $\mathcal{H}$ by curves $\mathcal X$ of degree $\mu+\lambda$ having $x^\mu y^\lambda$ as leading term w.r.t. the $\texttt{DegRevLex}$ term ordering (with $y>x$). Moreover, we show that any such curve $\mathcal X$ corresponds to minimum-weight codewords provided that the complete intersection divisor $\mathcal{H}\cap \mathcal X$ is made of simple $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$-points. Finally, using this geometric characterization, we propose an algorithm to compute the number of minimum weight codewords and we present comparison tables between our algorithm and MAGMA command $\mathtt{MinimumWords}$.