Identification of the zeroth-order coefficient in a time fractional diffusion equation

This paper is devoted to identify the zeroth-order coefficient in a time-fractional diffusion equation from two boundary measurement data in one-dimensional case. The existence and uniqueness of two kinds of weak solutions for the direct problem with Neumann boundary condition are proved. We provide the uniqueness for recovering the zeroth-order coefficient and fractional order simultaneously by the Laplace transformation and Gel'fand-Levitan theory. The identification of the zeroth-order coefficient is formulated into a variational problem by the Tikhonov regularization. The existence, stability and convergence of the solution for the variational problem are provided. We deduce an adjoint problem and then use a conjugate gradient method to solve the variational problem. Two numerical examples are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2016 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.