Limit cycles in slow-fast codimension 3 saddle and elliptic bifurcations

This paper deals with local bifurcations occurring near singular points of planar slow-fast systems. In particular, it is concerned with the study of the slow-fast variant of the unfolding of a codimension 3 nilpotent singularity. The slow-fast variant of a codimension 1 Hopf bifurcation has been studied extensively before and its study has lead to the notion of canard cycles in the Van der Pol system. Similarly, codimension 2 slow-fast Bogdanov–Takens bifurcations have been characterized. Here, the singularity is of codimension 3 and we distinguish slow-fast elliptic and slow-fast saddle bifurcations. We focus our study on the appearance on small-amplitude limit cycles, and rely on techniques from geometric singular perturbation theory and blow-up.