Birth of limit cycles bifurcating from a nonsmooth center (Q2453262)

The authors consider a piecewise-smooth vector field (PSVF) on the plane with a single discontinuity boundary. A point on the discontinuity boundary is referred to as a two-fold singularity if the PSVF has a quadratic tangency at the point on both sides of the discontinuity boundary. Moreover, a two-fold singularity is said to behave as a nondegenerate center if there exists a neighborhood of the singularity containing a family of closed orbits with the same orientation. In this framework, the authors show that a PSVF having a nondegenerate center is locally equivalent to a PSVF \(Z_{0}\), which describes the dynamics of a nonsmooth harmonic oscillator. Furthermore, it is shown that for any positive integer \(k\), there exists a small \(C^{\infty}\)-perturbation of \(Z_{0}\) having \(k\) hyperbolic limit cycles. The main techniques employed to prove the results are based on the Malgrange Preparation Theorem and an explicit construction of a \(C^{\infty}\)-perturbation of \(Z_{0}\).