Local Bifurcation of Critical Periods in Vector Fields With Homogeneous Nonlinearities of the Third Degree

Abstract

Abstract In this paper we study the local bifurcation of critical periods of periodic orbits in the neighborhood of a nondegenerate centre of a vector field with a homogeneous nonlinearity of the third degree. We show that at most three local critical periods bifurcate from a weak linear centre of finite order or from the linear isochrone and at most two local critical periods from the nonlinear isochrone. Moreover, in both cases, there are perturbations with the maximum number of critical periods.