Recovery of a potential in a fractional diffusion equation

Abstract

We consider the determination of an unknown potential $q(x)$ form a fractional diffusion equation subject to overposed lateral boundary data. We show that this data allows recovery of two spectral sequences for the associated inverse Sturm-Liouville problem and these are sufficient to apply standard uniqueness results for this case. We also look at reconstruction methods and in particular examine the issue of stability of the solution with respect to the data. The outcome shows the inverse problem to be severely ill-conditioned and we consider the differences between the cases of fractional and of classical diffusion.