Construction of quasi-cyclic self-dual codes over finite fields.

Our goal of this paper is to find a construction of all ℓ-quasi-cyclic self-dual codes over a finite field $ {\mathbb F}_q $ F q of length $ m\ell $ mℓ for every positive even integer ℓ. In this paper, we study the case where $ x^m-1 $ x m − 1 has an arbitrary number of irreducible factors in $ {\mathbb F}_q [x] $ F q [ x ] ; in the previous studies, only some special cases where $ x^m-1 $ x m − 1 has exactly two or three irreducible factors in $ {\mathbb F}_q [x] $ F q [ x ] , were studied. Firstly, the binary code case is completed: for any even positive integer ℓ, every binary ℓ-quasi-cyclic self-dual code can be obtained by our construction. Secondly, we work on the q-ary code cases for an odd prime power q. We find an explicit method for construction of all ℓ-quasi-cyclic self-dual codes over $ {\mathbb F}_q $ F q of length $ m\ell $ mℓ for any even positive integer ℓ, where we require that $ q \equiv 1 \pmod {4} $ q ≡ 1 (mod 4) if the index $ \ell \ge 6 $ ℓ ≥ 6. By implementation of our method, we obtain a new optimal binary self-dual code $ [172, 86, 24] $ [ 172 , 86 , 24 ] , which is also a quasi-cyclic code of index 4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]