On Eisenstein additive codes over chain rings and linear codes over mixed alphabets

Abstract: Let $\mathcal{R}e=GR(p^e,r)[y]/\langle g(y),p^{e-1}y^t\rangle$ be a finite commutative chain ring, where $p$ is a prime number, $GR(p^e,r)$ is the Galois ring of characteristic $p^e$ and rank $r,$ $t$ and $k$ are positive integers satisfying $1\leq t\leq k$ when $e \geq 2,$ while $t=k$ when $e=1,$ and $g(y)=y^k+p(g{k-1}y^{k-1}+\cdots+g_1y+g_0)\in GR(p^e,r)[y]$ is an Eisenstein polynomial with $g_0$ as a unit in $GR(p^e,r).$ In this paper, we first establish a duality-preserving 1-1 correspondence between additive codes over $\mathcal{R}e$ and $\mathbb{Z}{p^e}\mathbb{Z}_{p^{e-1}}$-linear codes, where the character-theoretic dual codes of additive codes over $\mathcal{R}e$ correspond to the Euclidean dual codes of $\mathbb{Z}{p^e}\mathbb{Z}_{p^{e-1}}$-linear codes, and vice versa. This correspondence gives rise to a method for constructing additive codes over $\mathcal{R}e$ and their character-theoretic dual codes, as unlike additive codes over $\mathcal{R}_e,$ $\mathbb{Z}{p^e}\mathbb{Z}_{p^{e-1}}$-linear codes can be completely described in terms of generator matrices. We also list additive codes over the chain ring $\mathbb{Z}_4[y]/\langle y^2-2,2y \rangle$ achieving the Plotkin's bound for homogeneous weights, which suggests that additive codes over $\mathcal{R}_e$ is a promising class of error-correcting codes to find optimal codes with respect to the homogeneous metric.