Inverse source problem of sub-diffusion of variable exponent

Abstract: This work investigates both direct and inverse problems of the variable-exponent sub-diffusion model, which attracts increasing attentions in both practical applications and theoretical aspects. Based on the perturbation method, which transfers the original model to an equivalent but more tractable form, the analytical extensibility of the solutions and the weak unique continuation principle are proved, which results in the uniqueness of the inverse space-dependent source problem from local internal observation. Then, based on the variational identity connecting the inversion input data with the unknown source function, we propose a weak norm and prove the conditional stability for the inverse problem in this norm. The iterative thresholding algorithm and Nesterov iteration scheme are employed to numerically reconstruct the smooth and non-smooth sources, respectively. Numerical experiments are performed to investigate their effectiveness.