Perturbations of quadratic centers of genus one

Abstract

We propose a program for finding the cyclicity of period annuli of quadratic systems with centers of genus one. As a first step, we classify all such systems and determine the essential one-parameter quadratic perturbations which produce the maximal number of limit cycles. We compute the associated Poincare-Pontryagin-Melnikov functions whose zeros control the number of limit cycles. To illustrate our approach, we determine the cyclicity of the annuli of two particular reversible systems.