In the theory of dynamic equations, investigation of the existence and uniqueness of periodic solutions has become a very popular research topic for mathematicians, and there is a vast literature on this research direction which focuses on the real life models constructed on continuous, discrete or hybrid time domains with periodic structures. Indeed, analysis of difference equations has taken a prominent attention as much as differential equations, and the studies based on periodicity for the solutions of differential equations have been carried on to discrete domains. Consequentially, the literature on differential and difference equations has grown simultaneously.
Conventional periodicity is a strong but a relaxable condition for some classes of functions. The studies concentrating on the existence of conventionally periodic solutions of dynamic equations may not cover many mathematical models which involve not exactly periodic but nearly periodic arguments in roughly speaking. It is possible to see such real life models in signal processing or in astrophysics (see [
1,
2,
3]). As a relaxation of the conventional periodicity, the almost periodicity notion was first introduced by H. Bohr ([
4]), and the theory of almost periodic functions has been developed by the contributions of several scientists including A.S. Besicovitch, S. Bochner, J. von Neumann, and W. Stepanoff who are very well known in the mathematics community (see [
5,
6,
7,
8]). The first definition of an almost periodic function was introduced as a topological property; that is a continuous function
is said to be almost periodic if the set
is relatively dense in
for all
Subsequently, Bochner proposed normality condition as an almost periodicity criterion, i.e., a continuous function
is called almost periodic if for every real sequence
there exists a subsequence
of
such that
uniformly for all
t (see [
6]). Afterwards, the theory of almost automorphic functions was introduced by S. Bochner ([
9]) by relaxing the uniform convergence from the normality condition. That is, a continuous function
is called almost automorphic if for every real sequence
one can extract a subsequence
of
such that
for each
Thus, the almost automorphy notion can be regarded as a weaker version of almost periodicity. It is obvious that the following relationship holds between the periodicity notions
while the inverse of the implication may not be correct. For example, the function
is almost periodic but not conventionally periodic, and
is an almost automorphic function which is not almost periodic (see [
10] and [
11]). In the recent past, the theories of almost periodic and almost automorphic functions have taken prominent attention from scholars, and the existence of almost periodic and almost automorphic solutions of dynamic equations has become a hot research topic on time domains with continuous, discrete and hybrid structures. We refer to readers the monographs ([
10,
12,
13,
14,
15]), papers ([
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27]), and references therein.
Analysis of the linkage between the existence of bounded and periodic solutions of dynamic equations has always been an interesting research topic in the applied mathematics. Massera’s theorem is the primary result for the qualitative theory of differential equations since it commentates boundedness and periodicity of the solutions (see [
28]). Since then, various versions of Massera’s theorem have been studied for linear and nonlinear dynamic equations over the last five decades. Undoubtfully, when the dynamic equation contains almost periodic or almost automorphic arguments, it becomes a gruelling task to relate the existence of bounded and almost periodic (almost automorphic) solutions. In [
29], Bohr and Neugebauer concentrated on the linear system
and showed that all bounded solutions of almost periodic system of this form are almost periodic on
. Actually, this crucial result can be regarded as an almost periodic analogue of the Massera’s theorem. Besides, it should be noted that when
and
A is conventionally periodic, then it is possible to pursue a similar approach in the light of Floquet theory ([
30]). On the other hand, the nonautonomous linear system with almost periodic coefficients
is handled by Favard ([
31]), and it is shown that the linear system has at least one almost periodic solution if it has a bounded solution under a separation assumption; that is, each bounded nontrivial solution of the system
satisfies
where
B is in the hull of
This conception is known as Favard’s theory in the existing literature. These milestone results have motivated researchers remarkably, and it is possible to find a detailed literature providing Massera, Bohr-Neugebauer, and Favard type theorems for various kind of dynamic equations based on conventional periodicity, almost periodicity, or almost automorphy notions. We refer to ([
21,
32,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37,
38,
39,
40]) as pioneering studies. However, we shall point out that there is a poor research backlog on Massera or Bohr-Neugebauer type theorems on the almost automorphic solutions of difference equations unlike the enormous literature on differential equations. Thus, one of the main objectives of this research is to make a new contribution to the qualitative theory of difference equations by filling the above-mentioned gap.
In this paper, we are inspired by the recent work [
21] of A. Chávez, M. Pinto and U. Zavaleta. We introduce a certain kind of nonlinear summation equation, namely a difference equation,
with discrete almost automorphic arguments. As the initial task of the study, we focus on the existence and uniqueness of discrete almost automorphic solutions of the nonlinear difference equation by employing fixed point theory. Then, we propose a Bohr-Neugebauer type theorem which relates the existence of bounded and discrete almost automorphic solutions. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first of its kind since it introduces a discrete counterpart of Bohr-Neugebauer theorem which has not been considered so far, and consequently, it contributes the ongoing theory of difference equations.