Lower bounds for the local cyclicity of centers using high order developments and parallelization

We are interested in small-amplitude isolated periodic orbits, so-called limit cycles, surrounding only one equilibrium point, that we locate at the origin. We develop a parallelization technique to study higher order developments, with respect to the parameters, of the return map near the origin. This technique is useful to study lower bounds for the local cyclicity of centers. We denote by M(n) the maximum number of limit cycles bifurcating from the origin via a degenerate Hopf bifurcation for a polynomial vector field of degree n. We get lower bounds for the local cyclicity of some known cubic centers and we prove that M(4) >= 20, M(5) >= 33, M(7) >= 61, M(8) >= 76, and M(9) >= 88. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (AU)