Existence of invariant densities for semiflows with jumps

Abstract: The problem of existence and uniqueness of absolutely continuous invariant measures for a class of piecewise deterministic Markov processes is investigated using the theory of substochastic semigroups obtained through the Kato--Voigt perturbation theorem on the $L^1$-space. We provide a new criterion for the existence of a strictly positive and unique invariant density for such processes. The long time qualitative behavior of the corresponding semigroups is also considered. To illustrate our general results we give a detailed study of a two dimensional model of gene expression with bursting.