Geometric Approach to b-Symbol Hamming Weights of Cyclic Codes

Symbol-pair codes were introduced by Cassuto and Blaum in 2010 to protect pair errors in symbol-pair read channels. Recently Yaakobi, Bruck and Siegel (2016) generalized this notion to b-symbol codes in order to consider consecutive b errors for a prescribed integer b ≥ 2, and they gave constructions and decoding algorithms. Cyclic codes were considered by various authors as candidates for symbol-pair codes and they established minimum distance bounds on (certain) cyclic codes. In this paper we use algebraic curves over finite fields in order to obtain tight lower and upper bounds on b-symbol Hamming weights of arbitrary cyclic codes over F
_q
. Here b ≥ 2 is an arbitrary prescribed positive integer and \mathbb F
_q
is an arbitrary finite field. We also present a stability theorem for an arbitrary cyclic code C of dimension k and length n: the b-symbol Hamming weight enumerator of C is the same as the k-symbol Hamming weight enumerator of C if k ≤ b ≤ n-1. Moreover, we give improved tight lower and upper bounds on b-symbol Hamming weights of some cyclic codes related to irreducible cyclic codes. Throughout the paper the length n is coprime to q.