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Symbol-pair codes were introduced by Cassuto and Blaum in 2010 to protect pair errors in symbol-pair read channels. Recently Yaakobi, Bruck and Siegel (2016) generalized this notion to b-symbol codes in order to consider consecutive b errors for a prescribed integer b ≥ 2, and they gave constructions and decoding algorithms. Cyclic codes were considered by various authors as candidates for symbol-pair codes and they established minimum distance bounds on (certain) cyclic codes. In this paper we use algebraic curves over finite fields in order to obtain tight lower and upper bounds on b-symbol Hamming weights of arbitrary cyclic codes over Fq. Here b ≥ 2 is an arbitrary prescribed positive integer and Fq is an arbitrary finite field. We also present a stability theorem for an arbitrary cyclic code C of dimension k and length n: the b-symbol Hamming weight enumerator of C is the same as the k-symbol Hamming weight enumerator of C if k ≤ b ≤ n−1. Moreover, we give improved tight lower and upper bounds on b-symbol Hamming weights of some cyclic codes related to irreducible cyclic codes. Throughout the paper the length n is coprime to q. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symbol-pair codes introduced by Cassuto and Blaum (2010) are designed to protect against pair errors in symbol-pair read channels. The higher the minimum pair distance, the more pair errors the code can correct. Maximum distance separable (MDS) symbol-pair codes are optimal in the sense that pair distance cannot be improved for given length and code size. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present three lower bounds for the minimum pair distance of constacyclic codes, the first two of which generalize the previously known results due to Cassuto and Blaum (2011) and Kai et al. (2015). The third one exhibits a lower bound for the minimum pair distance of repeated-root cyclic codes. Second, we obtain new MDS symbol-pair codes with minimum pair distance seven and eight through repeated-root cyclic codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]