Simultaneous Inversion of the Space-Dependent Source Term and the Initial Value in a Time-Fractional Diffusion Equation

Abstract The inverse problem for simultaneously identifying the space-dependent source term and the initial value in a time-fractional diffusion equation is studied in this paper. The simultaneous inversion is formulated into a system of two operator equations based on the Fourier method to the time-fractional diffusion equation. Under some suitable assumptions, the conditional stability of simultaneous inversion solutions is established, and the exponential Tikhonov regularization method is proposed to obtain the good approximations of simultaneous inversion solutions. Then the convergence estimations of inversion solutions are presented for a priori and a posteriori selections of regularization parameters. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate effectiveness of the proposed method.