Compactly supported distribution

A distribution has compact support when it vanishes on every test function supported outside some compact set. Every compactly supported distribution has finite order.

A compactly supported distribution of order of a distribution at most $M$ has a smooth function as its Fourier transform, bounded by $C⟨\xi {⟩}^M$. It therefore belongs to every Sobolev space $H^s$ with $s<-M-n/2$.

For $u\in {\mathcal{E}}^{\prime }({\mathbb{R}}^n)$, its Fourier transform is the smooth functionIt has at most polynomial growth, and its extension to complex frequency is controlled more precisely by the Paley–Wiener–Schwartz theorem.

Let a distribution have support in a compact convex set $K$. Fixed neighborhood cutoffs initially give an exponential bound larger than the support function $H_K$. Cutoffs of width $\epsilon$ cost powers of ${\epsilon }^{-1}$ in derivative estimates but enlarge the exponential by only $e^{C\epsilon |\mathrm{Im}z|}$. Choosing $\epsilon =(1+|z|{)}^{-1}$ absorbs the cutoff cost into a polynomial and retains the exact exponential $e^{H_K(\mathrm{Im}z)}$.

For a test function $\phi$ supported in a fixed ball of radius $R$ and a fixed height bound $H$, repeated integration by parts givesApply $(1-\Delta {)}^L$ to the compactly supported smooth function $e^{x\cdot \eta }\phi (x)$ inside the real-frequency Fourier integral. The bounded $\eta$ absorbs its derivative and exponential factors into the constant. This estimate makes the numerator of a Hörmander staircase integral absolutely integrable and makes truncated contour endpoints vanish.

Every compactly supported distribution is a finite sum of distributional derivatives of bounded continuous functions. One proof convolves it with a sufficiently high-order Bessel potential and then applies a power of $1-\Delta$.

Every compactly supported distribution on an open set $X$ is a finite sum $u={\sum }_{\alpha }{\partial }^{\alpha }{f}_{\alpha }$ with continuous $f_{\alpha }$ compactly supported inside $X$. One can first write $u={\partial }^{\gamma }F$ for a continuous global convolution primitive, then multiply by a cutoff function equal to one near the support. The identity $\chi {\partial }^{\gamma }F={\sum }_{\beta \le \gamma }(-1{)}^{|\beta |}(\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{\gamma }{\beta }){\partial }^{\gamma -\beta }[({\partial }^{\beta }\chi )F]$ localizes every coefficient. Finite global representation can fail for a distribution of unbounded order.

The Bessel potential of order $s$ is the Fourier multiplier $(1+|\xi {|}^2{)}^{-s/2}$. Sufficiently high order turns a compactly supported finite-order distribution into a bounded continuous function.