Error estimate of the nonuniform $L1$ type formula for the time fractional diffusion-wave equation

In this paper, a temporal nonuniform $L1$ type difference scheme is built up for the time fractional diffusion-wave equation with the help of the order reduction technique. The unconditional convergence of the nonuniform difference scheme is proved rigorously in $L^2$ norm. Our main tool is the discrete complementary convolution kernels with respect to the coefficient kernels of the L1 type formula. The positive definiteness of the complementary convolution kernels is shown to be vital to the stability and convergence. To the best of our knowledge, this property is proved at the first time on the nonuniform time meshes. Two numerical experiments are presented to verify the accuracy and the efficiency of the proposed numerical methods.