On one construction method for Hadamard matrices (Q6173469)

The authors of this paper present a new and general construction of binary Hadamard matrices. The construction involves first using a generalised concatenation method to construct \(\mathbb{Z}_p\)-codes with the Lee metric, and then to apply certain mappings to \(\mathbb{Z}_2\) that include the Gray map when \(p=4\). For the latter case, this construction allows codes over \(\mathbb{Z}_4\) of any arbitrary length \(n\) for which a Hadamard matrix of order \(n\) exists, with minimum Lee distance equal to \(n\) which, after the application of the Gray map, gives a binary Hadamard code of length \(2n\). The authors demonstrate this construction by constructing Hadamard codes of lengths \(n=16,32,48,64\) with almost all possible ranks and nullities, giving new lower bounds on the number of such codes up to isomorphism. It turns out that the authors' construction coincides in a special case with the Sylvester (or Kronecker) construction and can be regarded as a version of the modified Sylvester construction by No and Song; see [\textit{J.-S. No} and \textit{H.-Y. Song}, ``Generalized Sylvester-type Hadamard matrices'', Proc. 2000 IEEE Int. Symp. on Information Theory (ISIT'2000), Sorrento, Italy, June 25--30. 472 (2000; \url{doi:10.1109/ISIT.2000.866770})]. The authors generalise this modified Sylvester construction by using two families of Hadamard matrices, each respectively containing \(k\) matrices of order \(m\) and \(m\) matrices of order \(k\).