Quadratic-residue codes and cyclotomic fields (Q850772)

The authors look at cyclic codes of prime length \(p\) over a field a Galois field \(\text{GF}(q)\) where \(q\) is a prime that is a quadratic residue modulo \(p\). They do so via their embedding in codes over the quadratic field \(\mathbb Q(\sqrt{(-1)^{(p-1)/2}p})\). This allows them to provide a unified description of quadratic residue codes including a decoding algorithm that fully exploits the code's error correcting capacity. Since \(\mathbb Q(\sqrt{(-1)^{(p-1)/2}p})\) is the quadratic subfield of the \(p\)th cyclotomic field, this allows them to use Galois automorphisms of the cyclotomic field to accomplish the task. As illustrations they provide a complete set of quadratic residue codes of length 23 and dimension 12 including the Golay code, unique with respect to being the only perfect binary three-error-correcting code. They conclude the paper with five advantages of representations of quadratic codes in \(\mathbb C^p\).