Towards the complete determination of next-to-minimal weights of projective Reed-Muller codes (Q2227127)

Let \(\mathbb{F}_q\) be a finite field with \(q\) elements, and denote by \(\mathbb{P}^n(\mathbb{F}_q)\) the projective space of dimension \(n\) defined over \(\mathbb{F}_q\). Consider an integer \(d>0\) and \(a_1, \ldots,a_N\in\mathbb{P}^n(\mathbb{F}_q)\), where \(N = q^n+\cdots+q+1\). The projective Reed-Muller code of order \(d\) defined over \(\mathbb{P}^n(\mathbb{F}_q)\) is the image of the \(\mathbb{F}_q\)-linear transformation \(\phi_d : \mathbb{F}_q[X_1, \ldots , X_n]_d \rightarrow \mathbb{F}_q^N\) given by \(f \mapsto (f (a_1), \ldots , f (a_N ))\), where we write the points with the first nonzero entry from the left equal to 1. This code is denoted by PRM\((n, d)\), and its minimum distance is WPRM\(^{(1)}(n, d) = (q -\ell)q^{n-k-1}\), where \(k\) and \(\ell\) are the unique integers such that \(d-1 = k(q - 1) + \ell\), with \(1 \leq \ell \leq q -1\). In this work, the second lowest Hamming weight WPRM\(^{(2)}(n, d)\) which is also called next-to-minimal weights of PRM\((n, d)\) is computed, in the case where \(n \geq 3\), \(k = n -2\) and \(\ell = 1\), and also in the case where \(n \geq 2\), \(k = n - 2\), \(q\) is even and \(\ell= (q + 2)/2\). The proofs combine results of geometric nature with techniques from Gröbner basis theory.