A criticality result for polycycles in a family of quadratic reversible centers (Q1706617)

The authors study bifurcations of critical periods of reversible centers of the quadratic system \[ \dot{x}= -y +x y, \quad \dot{y} = x+D x^2 +F y^2, \qquad (1) \] where \(D\) and \(F\) are real parameters. The period function \(T(s)\) assigns each periodic orbit of system (1) its period. Isolated critical points of \(T(s)\) are called critical periods and the corresponding periodic orbits are referred as critical periodic orbits. Let \(\hat \mu = (D,F)\), \(X_{\mu} \) be the vector field defined by (1) and \(\Pi_{\hat \mu}\) be a polycycle which forms the boundary of the period annulus around the center of system (1) corresponding to the parameter \(\hat \mu\) (clearly, \(\Pi_{\hat \mu}\) has singular points only at infinity). The criticality of the polycycle \(\Pi_{\hat \mu}\), denoted Crit(\((\Pi_{\hat \mu},X_{\hat \mu}), X_\mu\)), is the exact number of critical periodic orbits of \(X_\mu\) which can bifurcate from \(\Pi_{\hat \mu}\) after small perturbations of the parameter \(\hat \mu\). The main result of the paper is the proof of the statement, that \[ \text{Crit}((\Pi_{\hat \mu},X_{\hat \mu}), X_\mu)=1 \] for any \(\hat \mu=(\hat D, \hat F),\) with \(\hat D=G(\hat F)\), where \(\frac 43< \hat F<\frac 32 \) and \( G(F) \) is an analytic function defined for \(F\in (1,\frac 32)\) and satisfying the properties: (a) \( -F < G(F)<-\frac 12 \) for all \(F\in (1,\frac 32)\), (b) \(\lim_{F\to \frac 32 } G(F)=-\frac 32,\) (c) \(\lim_{F\to 1 } G(F)=-\frac 12.\)