A Circulant Approach to Skew-Constacyclic Codes

We introduce circulant matrices that capture the structure of a skew-polynomial ring F[x;\theta] modulo the left ideal generated by a polynomial of the type x^n-a. This allows us to develop an approach to skew-constacyclic codes based on such circulants. Properties of these circulants are derived, and in particular it is shown that the transpose of a certain circulant is a circulant again. This recovers the well-known result that the dual of a skew-constacyclic code is a constacyclic code again. Special attention is paid to the case where x^n-a is two-sided.