THE SEPARATRIX VALUES OF A PLANAR HOMOCLINIC LOOP

Abstract

It is well known that the stability of a homoclinic loop for planar vector fields is closely related to the cyclicity of this homoclinic loop. For a planar homoclinic loop consisting of a hyperbolic saddle, the loop values are crucial to the stability. The loop values are divided into two classes: saddle values and separatrix values. The saddle values are related to Dulac map near the saddle, and the separatrix values are related to the regular map near the homoclinic loop. The alternation of these quantities determines the stability of the homoclinic loop. So, it is important to investigate the separatrix values in both theory and for practical applications. For a given planar vector field, we can try to calculate the saddle values by means of dual Liapunov constants or by finding elementary invariants developed by Liu and Li [1990]. The first separatrix value was obtained by Dulac. The second separatrix value was given by Han and Zhu [2007] and by Hu and Feng [2001] independently. The third separatrix value was obtained by Luo and Li [2005] by means of Tkachev's method. In this paper, we shall establish the formulae for the third and fourth separatrix values. As applications, we will give an example with the homoclinic bifurcation of order 9 and prove that the cyclicity of homoclinic loop together with double homoclinic loops is 57.