On the roots and minimum rank distance of skew cyclic codes

Abstract: Skew cyclic codes play the same role as cyclic codes in the theory of error-correcting codes for the rank metric. In this paper, we give descriptions of these codes by root spaces, cyclotomic spaces and idempotent generators. We prove that the lattice of skew cyclic codes is anti-isomorphic to the lattice of root spaces, study these two lattices and extend the rank-BCH bound on their minimum rank distance to rank-metric versions of the van Lint-Wilson's shift and Hartmann-Tzeng bounds. Finally, we study skew cyclic codes which are linear over the base field, proving that these codes include all Hamming-metric cyclic codes, giving then a new relation between these codes and rank-metric skew cyclic codes.