Cyclicity of sliding cycles in regularizations of piecewise linear two-folds

Abstract

We study limit cycles produced by Sotomayor-Teixeira regularizations of piecewise linear vector fields with generic two-fold singularities. We focus on the visible-visible and visible-invisible cases where sliding cycles occur, treating cycles from both sides of the switching manifold in a unified way. In further details, by relating the cyclicity of sliding cycles and zeros of the slow divergence integral, we prove that the cyclicity of compact families of sliding cycles is bounded by two when such integral does not vanish identically. In contrast to previous works, we do not perform a case-by-base study, but instead relate zeros of slow divergence integrals to crossing limit cycles of a suitably defined auxiliary piecewise linear system. For visible folds, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions that assure the existence of a unique simple zero of the slow divergence integral, which implies the existence of two limit cycles. We also show that, when a hyperbolic singularity of the sliding vector field lies at the boundary of the sliding segment, then the cyclicity is bounded by one.