An inductive construction of minimal codes (Q2119851)

A codeword \(c\) from a code \(C\) is minimal if it only covers the codewords \(\lambda c,\) with \(\lambda\in \mathbb{F}_q^\ast\) which means that for every codeword \(c'\) if the support of \(c\) is subset of the support of \(c'\) then \(c'=\lambda c.\) A code \(C\) is minimal if every nonzero codeword \(c\in C\) is minimal. Minimal codewords are of particular interest since they can be used to describe access structures in linear code-based secret sharing schemes. In this paper, the authors provide a total of three new constructions of minimal linear code. The first construction is an inductive construction of minimal linear codes which has a generator matrix in the form \(A_{t,q}=(I_t\vert B_{t,q}),\) where \(I_t\) is the identity matrix and \(B_{t,q}\) is a \(t\times \binom{t}{2}(q-1)\) matrix over \(\mathbb{F}_q\) with columns \(e_i+\lambda e_j, \lambda\in\mathbb{F}_q^\ast.\) The second construction considers codes with generator matrix \(\widetilde{A}_{t,q}=(I_t\vert \widetilde{B}_{t,q}),\) where \(\widetilde{B}_{t,q}\) is a \(t\times \binom{t}{2}(q-1)^{k-1}\) matrix over \(\mathbb{F}_q\) with columns \(e_{i_1}+\sum_{j=2}^{k}{\lambda_{i_j}e_{i_j}}, \lambda\in\mathbb{F}_q^\ast.\) It is proved that this code is minimal linear and an investigation on the weight distribution of such minimal codes is performed. The third construction is more general and it is proven that if \(\mathbb{F}_q^\ast=\langle\xi\rangle\) and \(t\geq 2\) is an integer, codes with generator matrix \(A_{t,q}'=\left(\begin{array}{cc} & \xi\ \xi^2 \ \ldots \xi^{q-2} \\ A_{t,q} & O \\ \end{array}\right)\) are minimal and satisfy that for every nonzero codeword \(w=(w_1,\ldots, w_n)\in C\) it follows \(|\{w_i : i \in \{1,\ldots, n\}\}| = q.\) The parameters of the codes investigated in this paper are not particularly good but their relevance is in allowing the construction of secret sharing schemes as well as in the fact that the knowledge of their weight distribution can be important in their classification. Multiple examples of minimal linear codes in any characteristic are given.