Recovering the source and initial value simultaneously in a parabolic equation

In this paper, we consider an inverse problem to simultaneously reconstruct the source term and initial data associated with a parabolic equation based on the additional temperature data at a terminal time t = T and the temperature data on an accessible part of a boundary. The conditional stability and uniqueness of the inverse problem are established. We apply a variational regularization method to recover the source and initial value. The existence, uniqueness and stability of the minimizer of the corresponding variational problem are obtained. Taking the minimizer as a regularized solution for the inverse problem, under an a priori and an a posteriori parameter choice rule, the convergence rates of the regularized solution under a source condition are also given. Furthermore, the source condition is characterized by an optimal control approach. Finally, we use a conjugate gradient method and a stopping criterion given by Morozov's discrepancy principle to solve the variational problem. Numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the feasibility of the method.