Subcovers and Codes on a Class of Trace-Defining Curves

Abstract

In this paper, we construct some class of explicit subcovers of the curve $\mathcal {X}_{n,r}$ defined over $\mathbb {F}_{q^{n}}$ by affine equation $y^{q^{n-1}}+\cdots +y^{q}+y=x^{q^{n-r}+1}-x^{q^{n}+q^{n-r}}$ . These subcovers are defined over $\mathbb {F}_{q^{n}}$ by affine equation $g_{s}(y)=x^{q^{n}+q^{n-r}}-x^{q^{n-r}+1}$ , where $g_{s}(y)$ is a $q$ -polynomial of degree $q^{s}$ . The Weierstrass semigroup $H(P_\infty)$ , where $P_\infty $ is the only point at infinity on such subcovers, is determined for $1 \leq s \leq 2r-n+1$ , and the corresponding one-point AG codes are investigated. Codes establishing new records on the parameters with respect to the previously known ones are discovered, and 108 improvements on MinT tables are obtained.