Some families of quadratic systems with at most one limit cycle

Abstract

The work of Chicone and Shafer published in 1982 together with the work of Bamon published in 1986 proved that any polynomial differential system of degree two has finitely many limit cycles. But the problem remains open of providing a uniform upper bound for the maximum number of limit cycles that a polynomial differential system of degree two can have, i.e. the second part of the 16th Hilbert problem restricted to the polynomial differential systems of degree two remains open. Here we present six subclasses of polynomial differential systems of degree two for which we can prove that an upper bound for their maximum number of limit cycles is one.