Chaotic Dynamics in an Impact Problem

We consider the model describing the vertical motion of a ball falling with constant acceleration on a wall and elastically reflected. The wall is supposed to move in the vertical direction according to a given periodic function f . We show that a modification of a method of Angenent based on sub- and super-solutions can be applied in order to detect chaotic dynamics. Using the theory of exact symplectic twist maps of the cylinder one can prove the result under “natural” conditions on the function f .