p-Adic valuation of weights in Abelian codes over /spl Zopf/(p/sup d/)

Abstract

Counting polynomial techniques introduced by Wilson are used to provide analogs of a theorem of McEliece. McEliece's original theorem relates the greatest power of p dividing the Hamming weights of words in cyclic codes over GF (p) to the length of the smallest unity-product sequence of nonzeroes of the code. Calderbank, Li, and Poonen presented analogs for cyclic codes over /spl Zopf/(2/sup d/) using various weight functions (Hamming, Lee, and Euclidean weight as well as count of occurrences of a particular symbol). Some of these results were strengthened by Wilson, who also considered the alphabet /spl Zopf/(p/sup d/) for p an arbitrary prime. These previous results, new strengthened versions, and generalizations are proved here in a unified and comprehensive fashion for the larger class of Abelian codes over /spl Zopf/(p/sup d/) with p any prime. For Abelian codes over /spl Zopf//sub 4/, combinatorial methods for use with counting polynomials are developed. These show that the analogs of McEliece's theorem obtained by Wilson (for Hamming weight, Lee weight, and symbol counts) and the analog obtained here for Euclidean weight are sharp in the sense that they give the maximum power of 2 that divides the weights of all the codewords whose Fourier transforms have a specified support.

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