Infinite Families of Linear Codes Supporting More t-Designs

Tang and Ding [IEEE IT 67 (2021) 244-254] studied the class of BCH codes $\mathcal {C}_{(q,q+1,4,1)}$ and their dual codes with $q=2^{m}$ and established that the codewords of the minimum (or the second minimum) weight in these codes support 4-designs or 3-designs. Motivated by this, we further investigate the codewords of the next adjacent weight in such codes and discover more infinite classes of $t$ -designs with $t=3,4$ . In particular, we prove that codewords of weight 7 in $\mathcal {C}_{(q,q+1,4,1)}$ support 4-designs for odd $m \geqslant 5$ and they support 3-designs for even $m \geqslant 4$ , which provide infinite classes of simple $t$ -designs with new parameters. Another significant class of $t$ -designs we produce in this paper has complementary designs with parameters 4- $(2^{2s+1}+ 1,5,5)$ ; these designs have the smallest index among all the known simple 4- $(q+1,5,\lambda)$ designs derived from codes for prime powers $q$ ; and they are further proved to be isomorphic to the 4-designs admitting the projective general linear group PGL $(2,2^{2s+1})$ as the automorphism group constructed by Alltop in 1969.