Minimal codewords arising from the incidence of points and hyperplanes in projective spaces (Q6112222)

Suppose \(q=p^h\) and let \({\mathcal C}_{n-1}(n,q)\) be the \(p\)-ary code generated by the rows of the incidence matrix of the point/hyperplane design of a projective space \(\mathrm{PG}(n,q)\). In particular the rows of this matrix correspond to the hyperplanes of \(\mathrm{PG}(n,q)\) (and, as such we shall call them hyperplanes). Put \(\theta_{n-1,q}:=|\mathrm{PG}(n-1,q)|\). In the paper under review, the authors provide an upper bound on the minimum number of non-zero coefficients of hyperplanes yielding low weight codewords of \({\mathcal C}_{n-1}(n,q)\). Their main result is the following theorem (observe that here \(q\) is never a prime). \par Theorem: Suppose \(n\geq 3\), \(h\geq 2\), \(p\) a prime and \(q=p^h\) with \(q\geq\max\{32,2^{2n-4}\}\) for \(h>2\) and \(q\geq 2^{2n}\) for \(h=2\). Then any codeword \(c\in{\mathcal C}_{n-1}(n,q)\) with weight \begin{itemize} \item \(\mathrm{wt}(c)\leq\left(\lfloor\frac{1}{2^{n-2}}\sqrt{q}\rfloor-1\right)\theta_{n-1,q}\) when \(h>2\) or \item \(\mathrm{wt}(c)\leq\left(\lfloor\frac{p}{2^n}\rfloor-1\right)\theta_{n-1,q}\) when \(h=2\) \end{itemize} is a linear combination of exactly \(\lceil\frac{\mathrm{wt}(c)}{\theta_{n-1,q}}\rceil\) different hyperplanes. Using this result (and under the same assumptions) the authors manage also to provide a characterization of the minimal codewords of \({\mathcal C}_{n-1}(n,q)\) of small weight.