Locally analytic distributions and

In this paper we study continuous representations of locally -analytic groups in locally convex -vector spaces, where is a finite extension of and is a spherically complete nonarchimedean extension field of . The class of such representations includes both the smooth representations of Langlands theory and the finite dimensional algebraic representations of , along with interesting new objects such as the action of on global sections of equivariant vector bundles on -adic symmetric spaces. We introduce a restricted category of such representations that we call ``strongly admissible' and we show that, when is compact, our category is anti-equivalent to a subcategory of the category of modules over the locally analytic distribution algebra of . As an application we prove the topological irreducibility of generic members of the -adic principal series for . Our hope is that our definition of strongly admissible representation may be used as a foundation for a general theory of continuous -valued representations of locally -analytic groups.