The index of impulsive periodic orbits (Q1985782)

The theory of impulsive dynamical systems is receiving much attention nowadays, and many researchers are dedicating their time unveiling the mysteries of such interesting systems. It began in the 1970's with the work of the Russian physicist \textit{V. Rozhko} [Diff. Urav. 8, No. 11, 2012--2022 (1972)] and gained its first mathematical rigorousness in 1990's. Roughly speaking, an impulsive dynamical system is an evolution law that suffers impulses when hitting predetermined states. In other words, an impulsive system is a discontinuous dynamical system. When allowing jumps to occur, many interesting phenomena can happen, such as the occurrence of disconnected global attractors, see [\textit{E. M. Bonotto} et al., J. Differ. Equations 259, No. 7, 2602--2625 (2015; Zbl 1356.37042)]. Many authors have worked with the basic definitions and results concerning stability and long-time behavior of solutions. Now, for planar impulsive dynamical systems, we can find the extension of several classical results, such as the Poincaré-Bendixson theorem and the Poincaré recurrence theorem. Following this line of research, in this work the authors deal with the theory of periodic orbits of planar impulsive dynamical systems, called {impulsive periodic orbits}, and their Zhukovskiǐ quasi-stabilities. To that end they introduce the concept of the {index} of a planar impulsive periodic orbit and obtain the relationship between this index and the Zhukovskiǐ quasi-stability in Theorems 3.2, 3.3, 3.5 and 3.6. To illustrate their results, a planar impulsive predator-prey model is studied in detail (see Theorem 4.1).