Detection of renewal system factors via the Conley index

Let be an isolating neighborhood for a map . If we can decompose into the disjoint union of compact sets and , then we can relate the dynamics on the maximal invariant set to the shift on two symbols by noting which component of each iterate of a point lies in. We examine a method, based on work by Mischaikow, Szymczak, et al., for using the discrete Conley index to detect explicit subshifts of the shift associated to . In essence, we measure the difference between the Conley index of and the sum of the indices of and .