A characterization of a class of optimal three-weight cyclic codes of dimension 3 over any finite field

It is well known that the problem of determining the weight distributions of families of cyclic codes is, in general, notoriously difficult. An even harder problem is to find characterizations of families of cyclic codes in terms of their weight distributions. On the other hand, it is also well known that cyclic codes with few weights have a great practical importance in coding theory and cryptography. In particular, cyclic codes having three nonzero weights have been studied by several authors, however, most of these efforts focused on cyclic codes over a prime field. In this work we present a characterization of a class of optimal three-weight cyclic codes of dimension 3 over any finite field.