Codes over and and Hermitian lattices over imaginary quadratic fields

We introduce a family of bi-dimensional theta functions which give uniformly explicit formulae for the theta series of hermitian lattices over imaginary quadratic fields constructed from codes over and , and give an interesting geometric characterization of the theta series that arise in terms of the basic strongly modular lattice . We identify some of the hermitian lattices constructed and observe an interesting pair of nonisomorphic 3/2 dimensional codes over that give rise to isomorphic hermitian lattices when constructed at the lowest level 7 but nonisomorphic lattices at higher levels. The results show that the two alphabets and are complementary and raise the natural question as to whether there are other such complementary alphabets for codes.