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.
In this paper, we make some progress towards a well-known conjecture on the minimum weights of binary cyclic codes with two primitive nonzeros. We also determine the Walsh spectrum of $Tr(x^d)$ over $F_{2^{m}}$ in the case where $m=2t$, $d=3+2^{t+1}$ and $gcd(d, 2^{m}-1)=1$.
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 t
he 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.
In this paper, we give a construction of strongly regular Cayley graphs and a construction of skew Hadamard difference sets. Both constructions are based on choosing cyclotomic classes in finite fields, and they generalize the constructions given by
Feng and Xiang cite{FX111,FX113}. Three infinite families of strongly regular graphs with new parameters are obtained. The main tools that we employed are index 2 Gauss sums, instead of cyclotomic numbers.
We revisit the old idea of constructing difference sets from cyclotomic classes. Two constructions of skew Hadamard difference sets are given in the additive groups of finite fields using unions of cyclotomic classes of order $N=2p_1^m$, where $p_1$
is a prime and $m$ a positive integer. Our main tools are index 2 Gauss sums, instead of cyclotomic numbers.
We construct twelve infinite families of pseudocyclic and non-amorphic association schemes, in which each nontrivial relation is a strongly regular graph. Three of the twelve families generalize the counterexamples to A. V. Ivanovs conjecture by Ikuta and Munemasa [15].
