BIFURCATION OF LIMIT CYCLES AND ISOCHRONOUS CENTERS FOR A QUARTIC SYSTEM

Abstract

For a quartic polynomial system we investigate bifurcations of limit cycles and obtain conditions for the origin to be a center. Computing the singular point values we find also the conditions for the origin to be the eighth order fine focus. It is proven that the system can have eight small amplitude limit cycles in a neighborhood of the origin. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of a quartic system with eight limit cycles bifurcated from a fine focus. We also give the sufficient and necessary conditions for the origin to be an isochronous center.