Stability in recovering the order of a time-fractional evolution equation

Abstract

We consider the recovery of the fractional order in a time-fractional evolution equation with a source of the form $p(t)f$, where the temporal factor $p$ is also unknown but belongs to a bounded admissible class and has a prescribed nonzero value at $t=0$. From one scalar observation we prove a uniform small-time expansion and obtain a Hölder estimate for the fractional order. More precisely, if a fixed derivative order $\gamma$ lies below every admissible fractional order, then the stability exponent is ${\alpha }_{+}/(2{\alpha }_{+}-\gamma )$; for the undifferentiated observation this gives the exponent $1/2$. We also show that differentiating the data to an order larger than all admissible fractional orders is supercritical: the corresponding derivative is unbounded near $t=0$ whenever the two fractional orders are different. A uniform estimate for the two-parameter Mittag--Leffler function, including the diagonal case, is proved in the appendix.

arXiv comment21 pages