A geometric characterization of minimal codes and their asymptotic performance (Q2070261)

A codeword is said to minimal if its support does not contain the support of another independent codeword. A linear code is minimal if all its nonzero codewords are minimal. The authors give a geometric characterization of minimal linear codes, relating them to cutting blocking sets and derive bounds on the length and distance of minimal codes based on their dimension and field size. They prove that this family of codes is asymptotically good and give geometric constructions of the codes.