A reaction coefficient identification problem for fractional diffusion

Abstract

We analyze a reaction coefficient identification problem for the spectral fractional powers of a symmetric, coercive, linear, elliptic, second-order operator in a bounded domain $Ω$. We realize fractional diffusion as the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for a nonuniformly elliptic problem posed on the semi-infinite cylinder $Ω\times (0,\infty)$. We thus consider an equivalent coefficient identification problem, where the coefficient to be identified appears explicitly. We derive existence of local solutions, optimality conditions, regularity estimates, and a rapid decay of solutions on the extended domain $(0,\infty)$. The latter property suggests a truncation that is suitable for numerical approximation. We thus propose and analyze a fully discrete scheme that discretizes the set of admissible coefficients with piecewise constant functions. The discretization of the state equation relies on the tensorization of a first-degree FEM in $Ω$ with a suitable $hp$-FEM in the extended dimension. We derive convergence results and obtain, under the assumption that in neighborhood of a local solution the second derivative of the reduced cost functional is coercive, a priori error estimates.