Limit cycles bifurcating from a perturbed quartic center (Q634905)

The paper is devoted to the study of the maximum number \(\sigma\) of limit cycles for the differential systems \[ \dot{x}=-y(x+a)(y+b)(x+c) + \varepsilon P_n(x,y), \;\dot{y}=x (x+a)(y+b)(x+c) + \varepsilon Q_n(x,y), \] bifurcating from the period annulus surrounding the origin of the unperturbed system, where \(a,b,c\in \mathbb{R}\setminus \{0\}\), \(P_n\) and \(Q_n\) are real polynomials of degree \(n\), \(\varepsilon\) is a small real parameter. By using the averaging theory of first order it is proved that \(4[(n-1)/2]+4\leq \sigma \leq 5[(n-1)/2]+14\).