Recovery of a Distributed Order Fractional Derivative in an Unknown Medium

Abstract: In this work, we study an inverse problem of recovering information about the weight in distributed-order time-fractional diffusion from the observation at one single point on the domain boundary. In the absence of an explicit knowledge of the medium, we prove that the one-point observation can uniquely determine the support bound of the weight. The proof is based on asymptotics of the data, analytic continuation and Titchmarch convolution theorem. When the medium is known, we give an alternative proof of an existing result, i.e., the one-point boundary observation uniquely determines the weight. Several numerical experiments are also presented to complement the analysis.