Bifurcation of Critical Periods from a Quartic Isochronous Center

Abstract

This paper is focused on the bifurcation of critical periods from a quartic rigidly isochronous center under any small quartic homogeneous perturbations. By studying the number of zeros of the first several terms in the expansion of the period function in ε, it shows that under any small quartic homogeneous perturbations, up to orders 1 and 2 in ε, there are at most two critical periods bifurcating from the periodic orbits of the unperturbed system respectively, and the upper bound can be reached. Up to order 3 in ε, there are at most six critical periods from the periodic orbits of the unperturbed system. Moreover, we consider a family of perturbed systems of this quartic rigidly isochronous center, and obtain that up to any order in ε, there are at most two critical periods bifurcating from the periodic orbits of the unperturbed one, and the upper bound is sharp.