Two families of few-weight codes over a finite chain ring

Abstract

Linear codes over finite chain rings meeting the Griesmer bound are particularly interesting since they are closely related to minihyper in projective Hjelmslev spaces. In this paper, motivated by the nice article (Li et al., 2018 [23]), two classes of linear codes with few non-zero Hamming weights over the finite chain ring R=Fq+uFq are constructed, and one of them meets the Griesmer bound over finite commutative local rings. By a Gray map, we obtain that the Gray images of the constructed codes over the ring R are linear codes with two weights over the finite field Fq with q elements, and these codes are optimal with respect to the well-known Griesmer bound under certain conditions. Our results give an affirmative answer to two (related) open questions raised in the article mentioned above. Remarkably, some of the constructed linear codes over R presented in this paper correspond to minihypers in projective Hjelmslev spaces over finite chain rings. Besides, their Gray images can be used to construct secret sharing schemes with nice access structures and other applications thanks to the minimality property that possesses our constructed codes.