Planar functions in odd characteristic were introduced by Dembowski and Ostrom in order to construct finite projective planes in 1968. They were also used in the constructions of DES-like iterated ciphers, error-correcting codes, and signal sets. Recently, a new notion of pseudo-planar functions in even characteristic was proposed by Zhou. These new pseudo-planar functions, as an analogue of planar functions in odd characteristic, also bring about finite projective planes. There are three known infinite families of pseudo-planar monomial functions constructed by Schmidt and Zhou, and Scherr and Zieve. In this paper, three new classes of pseudo-planar binomials are provided. Moreover, we find that each pseudo-planar function gives an association scheme which is defined on a Galois ring.
The known families of difference sets can be subdivided into three classes: difference sets with Singer parameters, cyclotomic difference sets, and difference sets with gcd$(v,n)>1$. It is remarkable that all the known difference sets with gcd$(v,n)>1$ have the so-called character divisibility property. In 1997, Jungnickel and Schmidt posed the problem of constructing difference sets with gcd$(v,n)>1$ that do not satisfy this property. In an attempt to attack this problem, we use difference sets with three nontrivial character values as candidates, and get some necessary conditions.
The determination of weight distribution of cyclic codes involves evaluation of Gauss sums and exponential sums. Despite of some cases where a neat expression is available, the computation is generally rather complicated. In this note, we determine the weight distribution of a class of reducible cyclic codes whose dual codes may have arbitrarily many zeros. This goal is achieved by building an unexpected connection between the corresponding exponential sums and the spectrums of Hermitian forms graphs.
