Minimum-weight codewords of the Hermitian codes are supported on complete intersections (Q2421336)

Let \(\mathbb F_{q^2}\) be the finite field with \(q^2\) elements, where \(q\) is a power of a prime. The Hermitian curve \(\mathcal{ H}\) is the affine, plane curve over \(\mathbb F_{q^2}\) defined by the equation \(x^{q+1} = y^q + y\). It is well suited for the construction of algebraic-geometric codes, since possesses the maximum number of \(\mathbb F_{q^2}\)-points allowed by the Hasse-Weil bound. In this paper, the authors continue the geometrical description of the support of the minimum weight codewords of the Hermitian codes started in [\textit{C. Marcolla} and \textit{M. Roggero}, Preprint, \url{arXiv:1510.03670}; Finite Fields Appl. 62, Article ID 101621, 22 p. (2020; Zbl 1436.94119)]. More precisely, they prove that for any Hermitian code \(C_m\), the support of every minimum-weight codeword is either a complete intersection of \(\mathcal{ H}\) and a curve \(X\) or a complete intersection of two curves \(X\) and \(Y\), neither of which can be \(\mathcal{ H}\). If the distance of the code is lower than \(q\), all the supports are of the second type and for those with distance at least \(q\) the supports are all of the first type, except for some special code among those with distance \(\mu q\), with \(\mu \leq q\), for which both types of support are present. Furthermore, they provide simple and explicit numerical criteria that allow to decide for each code what kind of supports its minimum-weight codewords have and to obtain a parametric description of the family (or the two families) of the supports.