Hopf bifurcation

In the mathematical theory of bifurcations, a Hopf or Poincaré–Andronov–Hopf bifurcation, named after Henri Poincaré, Eberhard Hopf, and Aleksandr Andronov, is a local bifurcation in which a fixed point of a dynamical system loses stability as a pair of complex conjugate eigenvalues of the linearization around the fixed point cross the imaginary axis of the complex plane. Under reasonably generic assumptions about the dynamical system, we can expect to see a small-amplitude limit cycle branching from the fixed point.