Analytic Tools to Bound the Criticality at the Outer Boundary of the Period Annulus

In this paper we consider planar potential differential systems and we study the bifurcation of critical periodic orbits from the outer boundary of the period annulus of a center. In the literature the usual approach to tackle this problem is to obtain a uniform asymptotic expansion of the period function near the outer boundary. The novelty in the present paper is that we directly embed the derivative of the period function into a collection of functions that form a Chebyshev system near the outer boundary. We obtain in this way explicit sufficient conditions in order that at most n⩾ 0 critical periodic orbits bifurcate from the outer boundary. These theoretical results are then applied to study the bifurcation diagram of the period function of the family x¨ = x^p- x^q, p, q∈ R with p> q.