Homoclinic bifurcation is a difficult and important topic of bifurcation theory. As we know, a general theory for a homoclinic loop passing through a hyperbolic saddle was established by [Roussarie, 1986]. Then the method of stability-changing to find limit cycles near a double homoclinic loop passing through a hyperbolic saddle was given in [Han & Chen, 2000], and further developed by [Han et al., 2003; Han & Zhu, 2007]. For a homoclinic loop passing through a nilpotent saddle there are essentially two different cases, which we distinguish by cuspidal type and smooth type, respectively. For the cuspidal type a general theory was recently established in [Zang et al., 2008]. In this paper, we consider limit cycle bifurcation near a double homoclinic loop passing through a nilpotent saddle by studying the analytical property of the first order Melnikov functions for general near-Hamiltonian systems and obtain the conditions for the perturbed system to have 8, 10 or 12 limit cycles in a neighborhood of the loop with seven different distributions. In particular, for the homoclinic loop of smooth type, a general theory is obtained as a consequence. We finally consider some polynomial systems and find a lower bound of the maximal number of limit cycles as an application of our main results.
Homoclinic loop and multiple limit cycle bifurcation surfaces