Metric perturbations and deformations of k-nondegenerate Z/2-harmonic 1-forms

We study metric perturbations and deformation theory for degenerate Z/2-harmonic 1-forms. For a natural class of degenerate examples, we prove that after a suitable perturbation of the ambient Riemannian metric, the form can be deformed to a nearby non-degenerate Z/2-harmonic 1-form. Our argument combines analysis of the leading coefficients in the local expansion under metric perturbations with a quantitative Nash-Moser implicit function theorem.