English

Identification of space-dependent coefficients in two competing terms of a nonlinear subdiffusion equation

Numerical Analysis 2026-02-02 v2 Numerical Analysis

Abstract

We consider a (sub)diffusion equation with a nonlinearity of the form pf(u)qupf(u)-qu, where pp and qq are space dependent functions. Prominent examples are the Fisher-KPP, the Frank-Kamenetskii-Zeldovich and the Allen-Cahn equations. We devise a fixed point scheme for reconstructing the spatially varying coefficients from interior observations a) at final time under two different excitations b) at two different time instances under a single excitation. Convergence of the scheme as well as local uniqueness of these coefficients is proven. Numerical experiments illustrate the performance of the reconstruction scheme.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.21018,
  title  = {Identification of space-dependent coefficients in two competing terms of a nonlinear subdiffusion equation},
  author = {Barbara Kaltenbacher and William Rundell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.21018},
  year   = {2026}
}