In this paper, we establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for quasi-cyclic (QC) codes with index even to be symplectic self-orthogonal. Subsequently, we present the lower and upper bounds on the minimum symplectic distances of a class of 1-generator QC codes and their symplectic dual codes by decomposing code spaces. As an application, we construct many new binary symplectic self-orthogonal QC codes with excellent parameters, leading to 117 record-breaking quantum error-correction codes.

The error coefficient of a linear code is defined as the number of minimum-weight codewords. In an additive white Gaussian noise channel, optimal linear codes with the smallest error coefficients achieve the best possible asymptotic frame error rate (AFER) among all optimal linear codes under maximum likelihood decoding. Such codes are referred to as AFER-optimal linear codes. The Griesmer bound is essential for determining the optimality of linear codes. However, establishing tight lower bounds on the error coefficients of Griesmer optimal linear codes is challenging, and the linear programming bound often performs inadequately. In this paper, we propose several iterative lower bounds for the error coefficients of Griesmer optimal linear codes. Specifically, for binary linear codes, our bounds are tight in most cases when the dimension does not exceed 5. To evaluate the performance of our bounds when they are not tight, we also determine the parameters of the remaining 5-dimensional AFER-optimal linear codes. Our final comparison demonstrates that even when our bounds are not tight, they remain very close to the actual values, with a gap of less than or equal to 2.

This paper aims to construct optimal quaternary additive codes with non-integer dimensions. Firstly, we propose combinatorial constructions of quaternary additive constant-weight codes, alongside additive generalized anticode construction. Subsequently, we propose generalized Construction X, which facilitates the construction of non-integer dimensional optimal additive codes from linear codes. Then, we construct ten classes of optimal quaternary non-integer dimensional additive codes through these two methods. As an application, we also determine the optimal additive$[n,3.5,n-t]_{4}$codes for all t with variable n, except for$t=6,7,12$.

The additive codes may have better parameters than linear codes. However, it is still a challenging problem to efficiently construct additive codes that outperform linear codes, especially those with greater distances than linear codes of the same lengths and dimensions. This paper focuses on constructing additive codes that outperform linear codes based on quasi-cyclic codes and combinatorial methods. Firstly, we propose a lower bound on the symplectic distance of 1-generator quasi-cyclic codes of index even. Secondly, we get many binary quasi-cyclic codes with large symplectic distances utilizing computer-supported combination and search methods, all of which correspond to good quaternary additive codes. Notably, some additive codes have greater distances than best-known quaternary linear codes in Grassl’s code table (bounds on the minimum distance of quaternary linear codeshttps://www.codetables.de) for the same lengths and dimensions. Moreover, employing a combinatorial approach, we partially determine the parameters of optimal quaternary additive 3.5-dimensional codes with lengths from 28 to 254. Finally, as an extension, we also construct some good additive complementary dual codes with larger distances than the best-known quaternary linear complementary dual codes in the literature.