Topological pressure for discontinuous semiflows and a variational principle for impulsive dynamical systems

Abstract

We introduce four, a priori different, notions of topological pressure for possibly discontinuous semiflows acting on compact metric spaces and observe that they all agree with the classical one when restricted to the continuous setting. Moreover, for a class of impulsive semiflows, which are examples of discontinuous systems, we prove a variational principle. As a consequence, we conclude that for this class of systems the four notions coincide and, moreover, they also coincide with the notion of topological pressure introduced in [2].