A note on Barker sequences of even length

Abstract

A Barker sequence is a binary sequence for which all nontrivial aperiodic autocorrelations are either 0, 1 or -1. The only known Barker sequences have length 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11 or 13. It is an old conjecture that no longer Barker sequences exist and in fact, there is an overwhelming evidence for this conjecture. For binary sequences of odd length, this conjecture is known to be true, whereas for even length it is still open, whether a Barker sequence of even length greater 4 exists.Similar to the well-known fact that a Barker sequence of odd length is necessarily skew-symmetric, we show that in the case of even length there is also a form of symmetry albeit weaker. In order to exploit this symmetry, we derive different formulas for the calculation of the aperiodic correlation. We prove by using only elementary methods that there is no Barker sequence of even length n > 4 with C, where C k denotes the kth aperiodic autocorrelation of the sequence.