Topological stable rank of \(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R})\) (Q2197649)

The paper studies the set \(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R})\) of all compactly supported distributions on \(\mathbb R\) and considers on this set the pointwise addition, pointwise multiplication by complex scalars, convolution in the role of the multiplication and strong dual topology as the topology. Under these algebraic operations, equipped with the strong dual topology, the set \(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R})\) becomes a commutative unital topological algebra with jointly continuous multiplication. For a positive integer \(n\), an \(n\)-tuple \((a_1, \dots, a_n)\) of elements of \(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R})\) is called unimodular if there exists another \(n\)-tuple \((b_1, \dots, b_n)\) of elements of \(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R})\) such that \(a_1b_1+\dots +a_nb_n\) is equal to the multiplicative unit of \(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R})\). The collection of all unimodular \(n\)-tuples of \(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R})\) is denoted by \(U_n(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R}))\). As the main result of the paper, it is shown that \(U_2(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R}))\) is dense in \(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R})\) but \(U_1(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R}))\) is not dense in \(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R})\), in other words, it is shown that the topological stable rank of \(\mathcal{E}'(\mathbb{R})\) is~\(2\).