Equivalence of Families of Polycyclic Codes over Finite Fields

We study the equivalence of families of polycyclic codes associated with polynomials of the form $x^n - a_{n-1}x^{n-1} - \ldots - a_1x - a_0$ over a finite field. We begin with the specific case of polycyclic codes associated with a trinomial $x^n - a_{\ell} x^{\ell} - a_0$ (for some $0< \ell <n$), which we refer to as \textit{$\ell$-trinomial codes}, after which we generalize our results to general polycyclic codes. We introduce an equivalence relation called \textit{$n$-equivalence}, which extends the known notion of $n$-equivalence for constacyclic codes \cite{Chen2014}. We compute the number of $n$-equivalence classes %, $N_{(n,\ell)}$, for this relation and provide conditions under which two families of polycyclic (or $\ell$-trinomial) codes are equivalent. In particular, we prove that when $\gcd(n, n-\ell) = 1$, any $\ell$-trinomial code family is equivalent to a trinomial code family associated with the polynomial $x^n - x^{\ell} - 1$. Finally, we focus on $p^{\ell}$-trinomial codes of length $p^{\ell+r}$, where $p$ is the characteristic of $\mathbb{F}_q$ and $r$ an integer, and provide some examples as an application of the theory developed in this paper.