Polycyclic codes over Galois rings with applications to repeated-root constacyclic codes (Q1931511)

This paper presents a method which determines the Hamming distance of the constacyclic codes of length \(\eta p^s\) over \(\mathrm{GR}(p^a,m)\) where \((\eta,p)= 1\). As a particular case, the Hamming distance of all cyclic codes of length \(p^s\) over \(\mathrm{GR}(p^2,m)\) and all negacyclic codes of length \(2p^s\) over \(\mathbb F_{p^m}\) are explicitly determined. This generalizes the results of S. R. López-Permouth et al. to constacyclic codes on the one hand, and on the other hand gives finer results in cases where the length of the code is divisible by two or the characteristic is \(p^2\).