Absolute cyclicity, Lyapunov quantities and center conditions

In this paper we consider analytic vector fields X₀ having a non-degenerate center point e. We estimate the maximum number of small amplitude limit cycles, i.e., limit cycles that arise after small perturbations of X₀ from e. When the perturbation (Xλ) is fixed, this number is referred to as the cyclicity of Xλ at e for λ near 0. In this paper, we study the so-called absolute cyclicity; i.e., an upper bound for the cyclicity of any perturbation Xλ for which the set defined by the center conditions is a fixed linear variety. It is known that the zero-set of the Lyapunov quantities correspond to the center conditions (Caubergh and Dumortier (2004) 6]). If the ideal generated by the Lyapunov quantities is regular, then the absolute cyclicity is the dimension of this so-called Lyapunov ideal minus 1. Here we study the absolute cyclicity in case that the Lyapunov ideal is not regular.