Left ideals of matrix rings and error-correcting codes (Q2043858)

Let \(\mathbb{F}_q\) be the field with \(q\) elements and denote by \(M_n(\mathbb{F}_q)\) full ring of \(n \times n\) matrices. It is known that \( M_n (\mathbb{F}_q)\) is semi-simple, so every left ideal is generated by just one element and it is possible to prove that such generator is an idempotent. These topics are strictly related to the construction of group codes, once known the ideal and its generator. In this work, the authors focus first on the computations of the number of left ideals in \(M_n(\mathbb{F}_q)\). Afterwards they compute the number of idempotents generating each ideal, providing a set of idempotent generators of all left ideals of a given rank. Finally, these results are used results for constructing interesting group codes. Some of these codes achieve good performance w.r.t. known ones.