Linear Codes and Character Sums

Let V be an rn-dimensional linear subspace of . Suppose the smallest Hamming weight of non-zero vectors in V is d. (In coding-theoretic terminology, V is a linear code of length n, rate r and distance d.) We settle two extremal problems on such spaces.First, we prove a (weak form) of a conjecture by Kalai and Linial and show that the fraction of vectors in V with weight d is exponentially small. Specifically, in the interesting case of a small r, this fraction does not exceed .We also answer a question of Ben-Or and show that if , then for every k, at most vectors of V have weight k.Our work draws on a simple connection between extremal properties of linear subspaces of and the distribution of values in short sums of -characters.* Supported in part by grants from the Israeli Academy of Sciences and the Binational Science Foundation Israel-USA. This work was done while the author was a student in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.