A system with three limit cycles appearing in a Hopf bifurcation and dying in a homoclinic bifurcation: The cusp of order 4 (Q1825345)

The authors study the polynomial system (a generalization of Bogdanov's system) \[ (1)\quad \dot x=y,\quad \dot y=-1+x^ 2+(\mu_ 1+\mu_ 2x+\mu_ 3x^ 3+\mu_ 4x^ 4)y \] under the conditions: \(\mu_ 4\neq 0\), all \(\mu_ i\) are small. Putting \(\nu_ i=\mu_ i/\mu_ 4\) \((i=1,2,3)\), they get an interesting but very complicated bifurcation diagram in the \((\nu_ 1,\nu_ 2,\nu_ 3)\) space. System (1) is studied as a perturbation of the Hamiltonian system (2) \(\dot x=y,\dot {\;}=-1+x^ 2\), limit cycles and separatrix cycles are considered as arising from closed level curves \(y^ 2/2+x-(1/3)x^ 3=h\) of (2). In the diagram one can find a smooth curve (3C), along which a triple limit cycle appears from a Hopf bifurcation of order 3, and dies in a homoclinic loop of order 3; and the region with 3 limit cycles is a topological 3-simplex. Skilful techniques were used to obtain the properties of the Melnikov function and its derivatives. Finally, the authors gave a sketch showing that the previous results can be used as a part of the proof that \[ \dot x=y,\quad \dot y=\epsilon_ 1+\epsilon_ 2y+x^ 2+\epsilon_ 3xy+\epsilon_ 4x^ 3y\pm x^ 4y \] is a universal unfolding of the system having a cusp of order 4: \(\dot x=y\), \(\dot y=x^ 2\pm x^ 4y.\)