On double homoclinic bifurcation of limit cycles in near-Hamiltonian systems on the cylinder (Q6587041)

In this paper, the authors studied the number of limit cycles that can emerge from homoclinic bifurcations in near-Hamiltonian systems near a double homoclinic loop where the Hamiltonian and perturbations are periodic functions. An analysis of such systems is motivated by several problems resulting from pendulum-like equations. The phase space can be taken as a circular cylinder.\N\NBy considering the expansions of the three Melnikov functions corresponding to the three families of periodic orbits near the double homoclinic loop and the partial derivatives of the Melnikov functions with respect to the total energy, they obtained a sufficient condition for the lower bound of the maximal number of limit cycles near the loop. As an illustration, the main results were applied to find the lower bound of the maximal number of limit cycles of a class of cylindrical systems where the Hamiltonian function is given by \(H(x,y) = \frac{1}{2}y^2 - \cos(x)-1\).