For a given Beurling–Carleson subset E of the unit circle $\mathbb {T}$ which has positive Lebesgue measure, we give explicit formulas for measurable functions supported on E such that their Cauchy transforms have smooth extensions from $\mathbb {D}$ to $\mathbb {T}$. The existence of such functions has been previously established by Khrushchev in 1978, in non-constructive ways by the use of duality arguments. We construct several families of such smooth Cauchy transforms and apply them in a few related problems in analysis: an irreducibility problem for the shift operator, an inner factor permanence problem. Our development leads to a self-contained duality proof of the density of smooth functions in a very large class of de Branges–Rovnyak spaces. This extends the previously known approximation results.

It is well known that for any inner function $\theta $ defined in the unit disk $\mathbb {D}$, the following two conditions: (i) there exists a sequence of polynomials $\{p_n\}_n$ such that $\lim _{n \to \infty } \theta (z) p_n(z) = 1$ for all $z \in \mathbb {D}$ and (ii) $\sup _n \| \theta p_n \|_\infty < \infty $, are incompatible, i.e., cannot be satisfied simultaneously. However, it is also known that if we relax the second condition to allow for arbitrarily slow growth of the sequence $\{ \theta (z) p_n(z)\}_n$ as $|z| \to 1$, then condition (i) can be met for some singular inner function. We discuss certain consequences of this fact which are related to the rate of decay of Taylor coefficients and moduli of continuity of functions in model spaces $K_\theta $. In particular, we establish a variant of a result of Khavinson and Dyakonov on nonexistence of functions with certain smoothness properties in $K_\theta $, and we show that the classical Aleksandrov theorem on density of continuous functions in $K_\theta $ is essentially optimal. We consider also the same questions in the context of de Branges–Rovnyak spaces $\mathcal {H}(b)$ and show that the corresponding approximation result also is optimal.