Ground states of time-harmonic semilinear Maxwell equations in R³ with vanishing permittivity

We investigate the existence of solutions $E:\mathbb{R}^3\to\mathbb{R}^3$ of the time-harmonic semilinear Maxwell equation $$\nabla\times(\nabla\times E) + V(x) E = \partial_E F(x,E) \quad \text{in}\mathbb{R}^3,$$ where $V:\mathbb{R}^3\to\mathbb{R}$, $V(x)\leq 0$ a.e. on $\mathbb{R}^3$, $\nabla\times$ denotes the curl operator in $\mathbb{R}^3$ and $F:\mathbb{R}^3\times\mathbb{R}^3\to\mathbb{R}$ is a nonlinear function in $E$. In particular we find a ground state solution provided that suitable growth conditions on $F$ are imposed and $L^{3/2}$-norm of $V$ is less than the best Sobolev constant. In applications $F$ is responsible for the nonlinear polarization and $V(x)=-\mu\omega^2\varepsilon(x)$ where $\mu>0$ is the magnetic permeability, $\omega$ is the frequency of the time-harmonic electric field $\Re\{E(x)e^{i\omega t}\}$ and $\varepsilon$ is the linear part of the permittivity in an inhomogeneous medium.