Limit cycle bifurcations in perturbations of planar piecewise smooth systems with multiply lines of critical points (Q2414815)

Consider the family of planar systems, \[\dot{x}=-y F(x,y)+\varepsilon P(x,y), \ \dot{y}=x F(x,y)+\varepsilon Q(x,y),\] where \(\varepsilon\) is a small parameter, \(F,P,Q\) are smooth or polynomial functions and \(F(0,0)\ne0\). Then, for \(\varepsilon=0\) it has a continuum of periodic orbits surrounding the origin and the problem of which ones remain as limit cycles of the perturbed system is of current interest. A usual framework is to fix an \(F\) or a class of them, consider \(P\) and \(Q\) arbitrary polynomial of degree at most \(n>0\), and study which is the maximum number of simple zeroes of its associated first order Melnikov function. In this paper, the authors consider a similar problem, but for discontinuous planar systems defined in two zones, namely: \[\dot{x}=-y F^\pm(x,y)+\varepsilon P^\pm(x,y),\ \dot{y}=x F^\pm(x,y)+\varepsilon Q\pm(x,y),\] where each one of the systems is only considered in \(\pm x>0\). In particular, they study the case \(F^\pm(x,y)=(1+a^\pm x)^m\). The techniques used are similar to that one in the smooth case but the computations are slightly more involved.