Weight distributions and weight hierarchies of a family of \(p\)-ary linear codes (Q2068379)

The trace codes are an interesting and diverse topic in coding theory. The weight hierarchy of a code \(C\) is defined as the sequence \(\{d_1(C), d_2(C),\ldots, d_k(C)\},\) where \(d_k=\text{min}\{|\text{Supp(H)}|: H\in [C,r]_p\}\) and \([C, r ]_p\) is the set of all \(\mathbb{F}_p\)-vector subspaces with dimension \(r.\) For the codes in this work, the authors choose a defining set contained in \(\mathbb{F}_2^q\): for \(\alpha\in\mathbb{F}_q^\ast\) set \(D = D_\alpha=\{(x,y)\in\mathbb{F}_q^2\setminus\{(0,0)\}: f(x)+\text{Tr}(\alpha y)=0\} =\{\text{d}_1,\ldots, \text{d}_n\},\) where \(f(x)=\sum\limits_{i=0}^{e-1}\text{Tr}(a_ix^{p^i+1})\), \(a_i\in\mathbb{F}_q\) is non-degenerate. So, the corresponding \(p\)-ary linear codes is \(C_\text{D}=\{\text{Tr}(x\cdot d_1), x\cdot d_2),\ldots, x\cdot d_n): x\in\mathbb{F}_q^2\}.\) The authors calculate the length of \(C_\text{D}\) which is \(n = p^{2e-1}-1\). The Hamming weight of nonzero codewords of this code is determined in two cases: (i) when \(v\in\mathbb{F}_q\setminus\mathbb{F}_{p}^{\ast}\alpha,\) \(\text{wt}(c_{(u,v)}) = p^{2e-2}(p-1);\) (ii) when \(v\in\mathbb{F}_{p}^{\ast}\alpha\) there are three subcases. All in all, the weight distribution of the linear code \(C_{\text{D}}\) as well as its weight hierarchy are presented.