Cyclicity of planar homoclinic loops and quadratic integrable systems

A general method for a homoclinic loop of planar Hamiltonian systems to bifurcate two or three limit cycles under perturbations is established. Certain conditions are given under which the cyclicity of a homoclinic loop equals 1 or 2. As an application to quadratic systems, it is proved that the cyclicity of homoclinic loops of quadratic integrable and non-Hamiltonian systems equals 2 except for one case. Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.