The number of limit cycles of Josephson equation

Abstract

In this paper, the existence and number of non-contractible limit cycles of the Josephson equation $\beta \frac{d^{2}\Phi}{dt^{2}}+(1+\gamma \cos \Phi)\frac{d\Phi}{dt}+\sin \Phi=\alpha$ are studied, where $\phi\in \mathbb S^{1}$ and $(\alpha,\beta,\gamma)\in \mathbb R^{3}$. Concretely, by using some appropriate transformations, we prove that such type of limit cycles are changed to limit cycles of some Abel equation. By developing the methods on limit cycles of Abel equation, we prove that there are at most two non-contractible limit cycles, and the upper bound is sharp. At last, combining with the results of the paper (Chen and Tang, J. Differential Equations, 2020), we show that the sum of the number of contractible and non-contractible limit cycles of the Josephson equation is also at most two, and give the possible configurations of limit cycles when two limit cycles appear.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figure