The concept of support of a distribution is an evident generalization of support of a continuous function as functions are generalized to distributions.
Of particular interest is the singular support of distributions, which is the subset of those points inside their support around which they are singular when regarded as generalized functions. This “local analysis” of singularities of distributions may be further refined to their microlocal analysis by considering not such the singular points, but also the directions of the propagation of the singularities at these points, which is the set of covectors over the singular support called the wave front set.
(support of a distribution)
Let be a smooth manifold and let be a distribution. Then the support of is the subset of all those points such that for every open neighbourhood the restricted distribution is not the zero-distribution
(e.g. Hörmander 90, def. 2.2.2)
By construction, the support of a distribution according to def. is a closed subset. If it happens to be a compact subset, then the distribution is said to be a compactly supported distribution.
(e.g. Hörmander 90, section 2.3)
(singular support)
Let be a smooth manifold and let be a distribution. Then the singular support is the subset of points such that for every open neighbourhood the restriction is singular, hence not a non-singular distribution.
A refinement of the information contained in the singular support of a distribution (def. ) is its wave front set, which over each point of the singular support records those covectors “along which the singularity propagates”, as made precise by the propagation of singularities theorem.
If a bump function has its (compact) support disjoint from the support of of a distribution (def. ), then the evaluation vanishes:
(e.g. Hörmander 90, theorem 2.2.1 and (2.2.1))
Lars Hörmander, The analysis of linear partial differential operators, vol. I, Springer 1983, 1990
Sergiu Klainerman, chapter 3, section 3.5 of Lecture notes in analysis, 2011 (pdf)
Last revised on October 17, 2022 at 05:14:19. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.