Isolated sets, catenary Lyapunov functions and expansive systems (Q2403329)

The author has obtained some interesting results on isolated sets for partial flows (Section 2), attractors and repellers in terms of Lyapunov functions (Section 3) and a special class of hyperbolic Lyapunov functions, called catenary functions (Section 4). One of the main results of the paper is Theorem 2.16 that shows that every isolated set \(\Lambda\) of a partial flow admits an isolating universe (see Definition 2.14) in which \(\Lambda\) is an intersection of an attractor and a repeller. Using this result, the author has proved that every isolated set admits a catenary function (Theorem 4.4). Some applications of the theoretical results are given in Section 5 (for expansive flows on compact metric spaces) and Section 6 (for discrete dynamics).