Sub-diffusion equations of fractional order and their fundamental solutions

The time-fractional diffusion equation is obtained by generalizing the standard diffusion equation by using a proper time-fractional derivative of order 1 —

β

in the Riemann-Liouville (R-L) sense or of order

β

in the Caputo (C) sense, with

β

∈ (0, 1). The two forms are equivalent and the fundamental solution of the associated Cauchy problem is interpreted as a probability density of a self-similar non-Markovian stochastic process, related to a phenomenon of sub- diffusion (the variance grows in time sub-linearly). A further generalization is obtained by considering a continuous or discrete distribution of fractional time-derivatives of order less than one. Then the two forms are no longer equivalent. However, the fundamental solution still is a probability density of a non-Markovian process but one exhibiting a distribution of time-scales instead of being self-similar: it is expressed in terms of an integral of Laplace type suitable for numerical computation. We consider with some detail two cases of diffusion of distributed order: the double order and the uniformly distributed order discussing the differences between the R-L and C approaches. For these cases we analyze in detail the behaviour of the fundamental solutions (numerically computed) and of the corresponding variance (analytically computed) through the exhibition of several plots. While for the R-L and for the C cases the fundamental solutions seem not to differ too much for moderate times, the behaviour of the corresponding variance for small and large times differs in a remarkable way.