Construction of spread codes based on abelian non-cyclic orbit codes (Q2226416)

Subspace codes are an important class of error-correcting codes that have important applications in network coding (see [\textit{R. Koetter} and \textit{F. R. Kschischang}, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 54, No. 8, 3579--3591 (2008; Zbl 1318.94111)]). These codes consist of a collection of subspaces over a base finite field, and the distance between two elements \(U_1\) and \(U_2\) is defined by \(d(U_1,U_2)=\dim(U_1)+\dim(U_2)-2\dim(U_1\cap U_2)\). Usually, it is interesting to study codes where all the codewords have the same dimension \(k\), which are called \textit{constant dimension codes} (i.e. elements of the Grassmannian variety \(\mathcal{G}_q(n,k)\)). This paper deals with orbit codes, which are codes defined by the orbits of a subgroup of \(\mathrm{GL}_n(\mathbb{F}_q)\) acting on \(\mathcal{G}_q(n,k)\). The class of codes arising from cyclic subgroups, that are called \textit{cyclic orbit codes}, are widely investigated. In this paper, the authors investigate abelian non-cyclic orbit codes arising from companion matrices of primitive polynomials over finite fields. They investigate their parameters and show that these codes are optimal partial spreads. These results answer an open problem in [\textit{J.-J. Climent} et al., Cryptogr. Commun. 11, No. 5, 839--852 (2019; Zbl 1419.94082)].