The unit impulse and step functions in continuous time

1.  The continuous-time unit step 

The reason why we begin with the unit step instead of the unit impulse  is that the unit impulse is a bit of abstract and we cannot find any signals like that in real world but we can derive if from unit step and as later we will find , this signal turns out to be of great importance . 

The continuous-time unit step  is defined in a manner similar to its discrete-time counterpart , which is specified in equation ( 1 ) and figure 1 . 

  (1)

One might want to say, " Hold on  a second , figure 1 is not the graph of equation 1 !!!! "  . Yes, it is just the approximation .  The matlab routine to plot figure 1 is shown as follows. 

>>  t = -10:1:10;    % the step is 1 
>>  unitstep = [(t>=0)];
>> plot(t,unitstep,'r');
>>  xlabel('t');ylabel('u(t)');
>>  title('Figure 1: continuous-time Unit Step function');

If we decrease the step in line 1 , figure 1 will get more closer to the actual graph of u(t) .

Please note that u(t) is discontinuous at t = 0. 

1.  The continuous-time unit impulse 

As shown in figure 2 (a) and (b) , U△(t) is the approximation of u(t) and δ△(t)  is  the  approximation of δ（t）.   u(t) is the limit of U△(t) as △ -> 0 . Also , when △ -> 0 , we will obtain δ（t）. 

As a matter of fact , we have two important relationships  between the unit step and unit impulse . These relationships are given in equation (2) and equation (3).

The continuous unit step and unit impulse are shown in figure 3  . Note that the area of the unit impulse is 1 .