Cyclic Codes and Cyclically Covering Subspaces over Finite Fields

Abstract

Let \(q\) be a power of a prime \(p\), and let \(n\) be a positive integer. A subspace \(U\subseteq \mathbb F_q^n\) is called cyclically covering if the union of all its cyclic shifts covers \(\mathbb F_q^n\), and \(h_q(n)\) denotes the maximum possible codimension of such a subspace. This paper studies cyclically covering subspaces via cyclic codes. We first prove that \(h_q(n)=0\) if and only if every nonzero cyclic code in \(\mathbb F_q^n\) contains a full-weight codeword. We also relate \(h_q(n)\) to the maximum weights of cyclic codes. In particular, when \(h_q(n)>0\), we obtain sharp bounds for the maximum weight of cyclic codes without full-weight codewords and provide explicit examples attaining these bounds. Moreover, we study the number of cyclic codes containing no full-weight codeword. We determine this number completely over \(\mathbb F_2\), and give lower bounds over \(\mathbb F_3\). From this, we prove that if \(q\ge 3\) is an odd prime and \(m\ge 4\) is an integer, then \(h_q\left(\frac{q^m+1}{2}\right)>0\).