An existence and uniqueness result about algebras of Schwartz distributions (Q6137880)

This paper is concerned with algebras of Schwartz distributions for which the conditions in Schwartz' usual impossiblity result are modified by replacing preservation of the product of continuous functions by preservation of the product of piecewise smooth functions \(\mathcal{C}^\infty_p\). The first result is that there is a family of products \(*_M\), \(M \subseteq \mathbb{R}\), such that the minimal space \(\mathcal{A}\) containing \(\mathcal{C}^\infty_p\) and closed under differentiation is an associative algebra for each of these products and satisfies the conditions of the modified impossibility result. The other main result is a minimality statement in the sense that any associative algebra \(\mathcal{G}\) of distributions satisfying these modified conditions and such that (1) any element is locally a finite order derivative of some continuous function in \(\mathcal{G}\) and (2) the product of \(\mathcal{G}\) with smooth functions is partially continuous contains \((\mathcal{A},+,*_M)\) as a subalgebra for some \(M \subseteq \mathbb{R}\).