A criticality result for polycycles in a family of quadratic reversible centers.

We consider the family of dehomogenized Loud's centers X μ = y ( x − 1 ) ∂ x + ( x + D x 2 + F y 2 ) ∂ y , where μ = ( D , F ) ∈ R 2 , and we study the number of critical periodic orbits that emerge or disappear from the polycycle at the boundary of the period annulus. This number is defined exactly the same way as the well-known notion of cyclicity of a limit periodic set and we call it criticality. The previous results on the issue for the family { X μ , μ ∈ R 2 } distinguish between parameters with criticality equal to zero (regular parameters) and those with criticality greater than zero (bifurcation parameters). A challenging problem not tackled so far is the computation of the criticality of the bifurcation parameters, which form a set Γ B of codimension 1 in R 2 . In the present paper we succeed in proving that a subset of Γ B has criticality equal to one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]