Bounded Kukles Systems of Degree Three

One of the most important tasks in the qualitative theory of differential equations in the plane is the study of global asymptotic stability: an equilibrium point that is globally attractive. It is known that if an equilibrium point of a planar vector field is globally asymptotically stable, then the vector field is bounded. A planar vector field is said to be bounded if the forward orbit of every point enters and remains in a compact set. In this paper, we study cubic Kukles systems that are bounded which is the first step toward the characterization of cubic Kukles systems that are globally asymptotically stable. We emphasize that these systems form a seven-parameter family of polynomial differential systems. We obtain a total of 25 cubic Kukles sub-systems that are bounded and we provide 11 phase portraits of such sub-systems in a neighborhood of infinity.