Regular and slow-fast codimension 4 saddle-node bifurcations (Q340360)

In the present paper the cyclicity of unfoldings of a nilpotent saddle-node singularity with singularity order 4 is analyzed. This amounts to study the family of vector fields given by \[ \begin{aligned} \dot{x} & = y \\ \dot{y} & = -xy +\epsilon (b_0+b_1x+b_2x^2+b_3x^3+x^4+x^5G(x,\lambda))+\epsilon y^2 H(x,y,\lambda), \end{aligned} \] where \(G\) and \(H\) are smooth, \(b=(b_0,b_1,b_2,b_3)\) is close to \(0\) and \(\epsilon\geq 0\) is either small (singular perturbation case) or \(\epsilon=1\) (the regular perturbation case). The main result states that the cyclicity is two, i.e. for any choice of \(b\) small and \(\varepsilon\) there can be at most two limit cycles inside a small neighborhood of \((x,y)=(0,0)\). The proof based on geometric singularity theory uses family and phase-directional blow-ups to reduce the problem to the study of slow-fast systems of a similar type but with a lower singularity order so that known results for these cases can be used to get bounds on the local cyclicity. Combining theses local results from slow-fast codimension 1 and 2 Hopf bifurcations, slow-fast Bogdanov-Takens bifurcations and slow-fast codimension 3 saddle and elliptic bifurcations then lead to a proof of the main result.