Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2009
In a recent paper, Christie and Gopalsamy [2] used Melnikov's method to establish a sufficient condition for the existence of chaotic behaviour, in the sense of Smale, in a particular time-periodically perturbed planar autonomous system of ordinary differential equations. They then concluded with an application to the dynamics of a one-dimensional anharmonic oscillator. In this paper, the same system is considered and a condition for the existence of subharmonic orbits in the perturbed system is deduced, using the subharmonic Melnikov theory. Finally, an application is given to the dynamical behaviour of the one-dimensional anharmonic oscillator system.