On ternary rotation symmetric bent functions

This paper is concerned with the existence, generation and counting of ternary rotation symmetric bent functions. The concept of rank of functions is introduced and it is shown that rotation symmetric bent ternary functions do exist and may be given a compact value vector representation with entries ordered by rank. A basic set of 3-place ternary rotation symmetric functions is extracted from a database of 3-place ternary bent functions. With the help of spectral invariant operations and some new operations a first set of 624 ternary rotation symmetric bent functions with n = 3 was obtained.