On Hopf bifurcations of piecewise planar Hamiltonian systems

Abstract In this paper we study the number of limit cycles appearing in Hopf bifurcations of piecewise planar Hamiltonian systems. For the case that the Hamiltonian function is a piecewise polynomials of a general form we obtain lower and upper bounds of the number of limit cycles near the origin respectively. For some systems of special form we obtain the Hopf cyclicity.