Simultaneous inversion of a fractional order and a space source term in an anomalous diffusion model

Abstract This paper is devoted to recovering simultaneously the fractional order and the space-dependent source term from partial Cauchy’s boundary data in a multidimensional time-fractional diffusion equation. The uniqueness of the inverse problem is obtained by employing analytic continuation and the Laplace transform. Then a modified non-stationary iterative Tikhonov regularization method with a regularization parameter chosen by a sigmoid-type function is used to find a stable approximate solution for the source term and the fractional order. Numerical examples in one-dimensional and two-dimensional cases are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.