Limit cycles in piecewise smooth perturbations of a class of cubic differential systems

Abstract

In this paper, we study the bifurcation of limit cycles from a class of cubic integrable non-Hamiltonian systems under arbitrarily small piecewise smooth perturbations of degree n . By using the averaging theory and complex method, the lower and upper bounds for the maximum number of limit cycles bifurcating from the period annulus of the unperturbed systems are given at first order in ε . It is also shown that in this case, the maximum number of limit cycles produced by piecewise smooth perturbations is almost twice the upper bound of the maximum number of limit cycles produced by smooth perturbations for the considered systems.