On the isochronous center of planar piecewise polynomial potential systems

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the isochronicity of two kinds of planar piecewise polynomial potential systems separated by x x -axis and y y -axis, respectively. By means of the expansion of the period function near the infinity, we obtain in this paper that for these two cases, the piecewise potential system has an isochronous center at the origin if and only if the subsystems are linear. It is however not true in the analytic scenario; one can find in the paper by F. Mañosas and P. J. Torres [Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 133 (2005), pp. 3027–3035] that the isochronicity of the center of the piecewise analytic potential system cannot imply the linearity of the two subsystems.