The 14th AIMS Conference

Inverse problems for nonlocal / nonlinear PDEs

 Organizer(s):
Name:
Affiliation:
Country:
Barbara Kaltenbacher
University of Klagenfurt
Austria
William Rundell
Texas A&M University
USA
 Introduction:  
  Fractional operators as components of partial differential equations have been studied since the 1950’s. In the late 1960s it was realised that the use of fractional order derivative damping terms in the wave equation restored a dependence on frequency; a missing requirement from physical observations that is not possible with integer order derivatives. Also dating from this period was the concept of fractional powers of partial differential operators. All such fractional operators are nonlocal; the value at a point depends also on values in a domain that includes that point as opposed to the pure pointwise situation of integer order derivatives. This paradigm has enormous implications in modelling but in particular for inverse problems involving such operators, especially those for which the "usual" inverse problem with integer order derivatives is severely ill-conditioned. Due to work over the last decade there are now many known examples of both fractional space operators and fractional time operators where such a “history effect” reduces the ill-conditioning significantly leading to much more tractable inversions. However, there is often a price to be paid and the cost is in a more difficult analysis due to the absence of some classical tools. This also shows up in the difficulty of proving uniqueness of the inversion map. The purpose of the special session is to bring together people working on different aspects of this topic.