Cyclic Sieving for Cyclic Codes

Abstract

Prompted by a question of Jim Propp, this paper examines the cyclic sieving phenomenon (CSP) in certain cyclic codes. For example, it is shown that, among dual Hamming codes over $F_q$, the generating function for codedwords according to the major index statistic (resp. the inversion statistic) gives rise to a CSP when $q=2$ or $q=3$ (resp. when $q=2$). A byproduct is a curious characterization of the irreducible polynomials in $F_2[x]$ and $F_3[x]$ that are primitive.