Creation of limit cycles in piecewise smooth vector fields tangent to nested tori (Q2046954)

Many problems from real world applications are modelled by vector fields tangent to foliations. A smooth foliation is a decomposition of a smooth manifold of class \(C^r\) (\(r\geq 1\)) into a disjoint union of immersed connected submanifolds called leaves. A piecewise smooth foliation is obtained by the concatenation of smooth foliations. In this paper, the authors aim to investigate the behavior generated by piecewise smooth vector fields tangent to piecewise smooth foliations. More precisely, for \((x, y, z)\in \mathbb{R}^3\setminus \{z-\textrm{axis} \}\), the smooth vector field \[ X(x, y, z) =\left(x, y, \frac{4+(x^2+y^2)(17-12(x^2+y^2))}{4\sqrt{x^2+y^2}}\right) \] is tangent to the foliation \(\mathcal{F}_1\) formed as the revolution of parabolas concave downward, except the \(z\)-axis, and the vector field \[ Y(x, y, z) =\left(-x, -y, \frac{4+(x^2+y^2)(17-12(x^2+y^2))}{4\sqrt{x^2+y^2}}\right) \] is tangent to the foliation \(\mathcal{F}_2\) formed as the revolution of parabolas concave upward, except the \(z\)-axis. Then \(\mathcal{F}_1\) defined for \(z\geq 0\) and \(\mathcal{F}_2\) defined for \(z\leq 0\) are coupled, giving rise to a piecewise smooth foliation \(\mathcal{F}\) formed by topological tori in such a way that the piecewise smooth vector field obtained by \(X(x, y, z)\) for \(z\geq 0\) and \(Y(x, y, z)\) for \(z\leq 0\) is tangent to \(\mathcal{F}\). The authors prove that, there exists perturbations \(Z_{\varepsilon}\) for such a vector field such that when \(\varepsilon\rightarrow 0\): (1) for any given \(k\geq 1\), \(Z_{\varepsilon}\) has exactly \(2k\) limit cycles; (2) for any given \(k\geq 1\) and \(m\geq 1\), \(Z_{\varepsilon}\) has exactly \(2k\) limit cycles of multiplicity \(m\); (3) \(Z_{\varepsilon}\) has infinitely many limit cycles.