Smoothing plurisubharmonic functions on complex spaces (Q2266787)

Richberg has shown that if U is an open subset of a complex manifold X, then any continuous strongly plurisubharmonic function \(\phi\) on X can be uniformly approximated by functions which are continuous and strongly plurisubharmonic on X, \(C^{\infty}\) on U, and equal to \(\phi\) on the complement of U. We use Richberg's methods and the fact that weakly plurisubharmonic functions are plurisubharmonic (proved by Fornaess and Narasimhan) to show that this is also true when X is an arbitrary complex space. In local coordinates on U, these approximations have extensions to open sets in \({\mathbb{C}}^ n\) which are simultaneously \(C^{\infty}\) and strongly plurisubharmonic. We show that if X is a manifold and \(\phi\) is \(C^ k\) strongly plurisubharmonic, then \(\phi\) can be approximated uniformly in \(C^ k\) norm by functions which are \(C^ k\) strongly plurisubharmonic on X, \(C^{\infty}\) on U, and equal to \(\phi\) on the complement of U. Also, we discuss the problem of extending plurisubharmonic functions which are originally defined only on a subvariety of a domain.