  Cyclic codes are an interesting type of linear codes and have wide
applications in communication and storage systems due to their efficient
encoding and decoding algorithms. Inspired by the recent work on binary cyclic
codes published in IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 68, no. 12, pp. 7842-7849,
2022, and the arXiv paper arXiv:2301.06446, the objectives of this paper are
the construction and analyses of four infinite families of ternary cyclic codes
with length $n=3^m-1$ for odd $m$ and dimension $k \in \{n/2, (n + 2)/2\}$
whose minimum distances have a square-root-like lower bound. Their duals have
parameters $[n, k^\perp, d^\perp]$, where $k^\perp \in \{n/2, (n- 2)/2\}$ and
$d^\perp$ also has a square-root-like lower bound. These families of codes and
their duals contain distance-optimal cyclic codes.
