Algebraic-geometric codes from vector bundles and their decoding

Algebraic-geometric codes can be constructed by evaluating a certain set of functions on a set of distinct rational points of an algebraic curve. The set of functions that are evaluated is the linear space of a given divisor or, equivalently, the set of section of a given line bundle. Using arbitrary rank vector bundles on algebraic curves, we propose a natural generalization of the above construction. Our codes can also be seen as interleaved versions of classical algebraic-geometric codes. We show that the algorithm of Brown, Minder and Shokrollahi can be extended to this new class of codes and it corrects any number of errors up to t∗ − g/2, where t∗ is the designed correction capacity of the code and g is the curve genus.