A note on the existence and uniqueness of solutions of frequency domain elastic wave problems: apriori estimates in H¹.

In this note, we provide existence and uniqueness results for frequency domain elastic wave problems. These problems are posed on the complement of a bounded domain (the scatterer). The boundary condition at infinity is given by the Kupradze-Sommerfeld radiation condition and involves different Sommerfeld conditions on different components of the field. Our results are obtained by setting up the problem as a variational problem in the Sobolev space H¹ on a bounded domain. We use a nonlocal boundary condition which is related to the Dirichlet to Neumann conditions used for acoustic and electromagnetic scattering problems. We obtain stability results for the source problem, a necessary ingredient for the analysis of numerical methods for this problem based on finite elements or finite differences.