Pressure and equilibrium states for countable state markov shifts

We give a general definition of the topological pressurePtop(f, S) for continuous real valued functionsf: X→ℝ on transitive countable state Markov shifts (X, S). A variational principle holds for functions satisfying a mild distortion property. We introduce a new notion of Z-recurrent functions. Given any such functionf, we show a general method how to obtain tight sequences of invariant probability measures supported on periodic points such that a weak accumulation pointμ is an equilibrium state forf if and only if εf−dμ