Simultaneous determination of source term and the initial value in the space-fractional diffusion problem by a novel modified quasi-reversibility regularization method

Abstract This paper deals with an inverse problem of determining source term and initial data simultaneously for a space-fractional diffusion equation in a strip domain, with the aid of extra measurement data at a fixed time. The uniqueness results are obtained by a simple trick based on the linear property of the proposed equation. Since this problem is ill-posed, a modified quasi-reversibility method is obtained by employing the Fourier transform. Error estimates for source term and initial value are obtained from a suitable parameter choice rule. Finally, several numerical examples show that the proposed regularization method is effective and stable.