A Galerkin Finite Element Method for the Fractional Calder\'on Problem

Abstract

We study a numerical reconstruction strategy for the potential in the fractional Calder\'on problem from a single partial exterior measurement. The forward model is the fractional Schr\"odinger equation in a bounded domain, with prescribed exterior Dirichlet datum and corresponding measurement of the exterior flux in an open observation set. Motivated by single-measurement uniqueness results based on unique continuation \cite{ghosh2020uniqueness}, we propose a decomposition strategy and a Galerkin--Tikhonov method to recover the potential by a stabilized least-squares quotient in a dedicated coefficient space. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the discrete reconstructor and establish conditional convergence under natural consistency and parameter choice assumptions. We further derive {\it a priori} error estimates for the reconstructed state and for the coefficient reconstruction, and combine the latter with logarithmic stability for the continuous inverse problem to obtain a total coefficient error bound. The framework cleanly separates the forward solver from the inverse reconstruction step and is compatible with practical truncation and quadrature schemes for the integral fractional Laplacian. Numerical experiments in one and two space dimensions illustrate stability with respect to noise and demonstrate reconstructions of both smooth and discontinuous potentials.