Modular and \(p\)-adic cyclic codes (Q1894267)

This paper studies \(p\)-adic cyclic codes for the first time. The first part gives some basic results on the structure of cyclic codes of length \(n\) over the ring of integers modulo \(p^a\) and over the \(p\)-adic numbers, where \(p\) is a prime not dividing \(n\). In the second part, the authors show how to lift cyclic codes over \(GF(p)\) to cyclic codes over the ring of integers modulo \(p^a\) and over the \(p\)-adic numbers. The authors present several examples of 2-adic generalizations of extended cyclic codes and study their distance properties as well as their symmetry groups. The examples include the quaternary Nordstrom-Robinson code, the Hamming code of length 8, the Golay code of length 24, the 3-adic Golay code of length 12 and some quadratic residue codes.