Minimal codewords arising from the incidence of points and hyperplanes in projective spaces

Over the past few years, the codes ${\mathcal{C}}_{n-1}(n,q)$ arising from the incidence of points and hyperplanes in the projective space $\text{PG}(n,q)$ attracted a lot of attention. In particular, small weight codewords of ${\mathcal{C}}_{n-1}(n,q)$ are a topic of investigation. The main result of this work states that, if $q$ is large enough and not prime, a codeword having weight smaller than roughly $\frac{1}{2^{n-2}}{q}^{n-1}\sqrt{q}$ can be written as a linear combination of a few hyperplanes. Consequently, we use this result to provide a graph-theoretical sufficient condition for these codewords of small weight to be minimal.