Well-posedness of first-order acoustic wave equations and space-time finite element approximation

Abstract We study a first-order system formulation of the (acoustic) wave equation and prove that the operator of this system is an isomorphism from an appropriately defined graph space to $L^{2}$. The results rely on well-posedness and stability of the weak and ultraweak formulation of the second-order wave equation. As an application, we define and analyze a space-time least-squares finite element method for solving the wave equation. Some numerical examples for one- and two-dimensional spatial domains are presented.