A Class of Two-Weight and Three-Weight Linear Codes and Their Duals

The objective of this paper is to construct a class of linear codes with two nonzero weights and three nonzero weights by using the general trace functions, which weight distributions has been determined. These linear codes contain some optimal codes, which meets certain bound on linear codes. The dual codes are also studied and proved to be optimal or almost optimal. These codes may have applications in authentication codes, secret sharing schemes and strongly regular graphs.