A strongly degenerate elliptic equation arising from the semilinear Maxwell equations (Q1764090)

The authors deal with the semilinear elliptic degenerate equation \[ \nabla\times\nabla\times A= f'(A),\tag{1} \] where \(\nabla\times A\) denotes the curl operator, \(f'\) is the gradient of a strictly convex smooth function \(f: \mathbb R^3\times\mathbb R\) and \(A: \mathbb R^3\to \mathbb R^3\) is the gauge potential related to the magnetic field \(H\) \((H= \nabla\times A)\). The presence of the curl operator makes (1) strongly degenerate. The authors use a global Lyapunov-Schmidt type argument combined with a new functional framework related to the Hodge splitting of the vector field \(A\).