On the Hamming weight of repeated root cyclic and negacyclic codes over Galois rings (Q2268673)

Let \(p\) be a prime and consider cyclic and negacyclic codes of length \(p^s\) over the Galois ring \(\mathrm{GR}(p^a,m)\). The study of these codes for the negacyclic case, including the Hamming distances, was done by \textit{H.Q. Dinh, S. López-Permouth} and \textit{S. Szabo} in [Codes over rings. Proceedings of the CIMPA summer school, Ankara, Turkey, 2008. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific. Series on Coding Theory and Cryptology 6, 22--59 (2009; Zbl 1209.94066)] when \(p=2\) and \(m=1\), and later generalized by \textit{H. Q. Dinh} to arbitrary \(m\) in [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 51, No. 12, 4252--4262 (2005; Zbl 1246.94051)]. In all mentioned cases, the codes correspond to principal ideals of the ambient space \(Z_{2^a[x]}/x^{p^s+1}\). This is a consequence of the fact that the code ambients are chain rings. In the remaining cases the code ambients are no chain rings, not even principal ideal rings. Such remaining cases are cyclic codes over \(\mathrm{GR}(p^a,m)\) for \(a>1\) and negacyclic codes over \(\mathrm{GR}(p^a,m)\) for odd prime \(p\) and \(a>1\). In this paper these remaining cases are studied and a method for computing the Hamming distance of any code is provided.