A survey on \(p\)-ary and generalized bent functions (Q2154880): Difference between revisions

This is an expository article on bent functions and their generalizations, written by a master of the subject. It features an extensive bibliography of 125 references as well as a wide variety of bent function constructions, examples (and non-examples), and open questions. Sections 1 and 2 recall basic definitions and results, for example the well-known Kumar-Schultz-Welch result (and some generalizations) on the possible values of the Walsh transform for a bent function. Section 3 recalls well-known constructions and examples. For example, \begin{itemize} \item the quadratic bent functions (which go all the way back to Rothaus) and some of their vectorial generalizations, \item the Maiorana-McFarland bent functions, \item bent functions arising from spreads and partial spreads, \item bent functions arising from monomials and binomials (for example, those of Helleseth and Kolosha), \item planar functions, \end{itemize} and others. This section ends with some open questions. Section 4 surveys regularity and duality properties of bent functions. Examples of non-weakly regular bent functions are given, as well as examples of those for which the dual is not bent. This section also ends with some interesting open questions. Section 5 deals with some key properties of bent functions, such as a sharp upper bound for their algebraic degree, normality properties, minimum distance and other coding-theoretic results. Open questions are scattered throughout this section. Section 6 deals with the connection, discovered initially by Dillon in his PhD thesis, between bent functions and partial difference sets (PDSs). The section begins by recalling Dillon's characterication of Boolean bent functions in terms of PDSs. A bent function has an associated (additive) Cayley graph, as does a PDS, and both of these associated graphs have an especially regular structure. Bernasconi, in her PhD thesis, tied these together by finding a close relationship between Boolean bent functions and certain strongly regular graphs. The precise characterization was published in a 2001 paper she co-authored with Codenotti and VanderKam. Subsection 6.1 discusses generalizations of these results to the more complicated case of p-ary bent functions and vectorial bent functions. This is ongoing research of many people, for example the author of the survey under review. The subsection closes with several interesting open questions. Section 6.2 discusses the related work of Joyner and Melles and their co-authors using the language of edge-weighted graphs and symmetric association schemes. Section 7 deals with another sort of generalization -- the bentness of functions \(f:GF(p)^n \to {\mathbb{Z}}_{p^k}={\mathbb{Z}}/p^k{\mathbb{Z}}\). These results can be quite technical and this too is ongoing research of many people. Several interesting open questions are scattered throughout this section. This is a well-written survey with a large bibliography and a terrific source of open questions. The interested reader is encouraged to read the paper itself for more details.