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Phys. Rev. E 78, 021111 (2008) [13 pages]

Generalized fractional diffusion equations for accelerating subdiffusion and truncated Lévy flights

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A. V. Chechkin1, V. Yu. Gonchar1, R. Gorenflo2, N. Korabel3, and I. M. Sokolov4
1Institute for Theoretical Physics NSC KIPT, Akademicheskaya street, 1, 61108 Kharkov, Ukraine
2Institute of Mathematics, Free University of Berlin, Arnimallee 3, D-14195 Berlin-Dahlem, Germany
3Physics Department, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel
4Institute of Physics, Humboldt University, Newtonstrasse 15, D-12489 Berlin, Germany

Received 25 January 2008; published 12 August 2008

Fractional diffusion equations are widely used to describe anomalous diffusion processes where the characteristic displacement scales as a power of time. For processes lacking such scaling the corresponding description may be given by diffusion equations with fractional derivatives of distributed order. Such equations were introduced in A. V. Chechkin, R. Gorenflo and I. Sokolov Phys. Rev. E 66 046129 (2002) for the description of the processes getting more anomalous in the course of time (decelerating subdiffusion and accelerating superdiffusion). Here we discuss the properties of diffusion equations with fractional derivatives of the distributed order for the description of anomalous relaxation and diffusion phenomena getting less anomalous in the course of time, which we call, respectively, accelerating subdiffusion and decelerating superdiffusion. For the former process, by taking a relatively simple particular example with two fixed anomalous diffusion exponents we show that the proposed equation effectively describes the subdiffusion phenomenon with diffusion exponent varying in time. For the latter process we demonstrate by a particular example how the power-law truncated Lévy stable distribution evolves in time to the distribution with power-law asymptotics and Gaussian shape in the central part. The special case of two different orders is characteristic for the general situation in which the extreme orders dominate the asymptotics.

© 2008 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.78.021111
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevE.78.021111
PACS:
05.40.−a, 05.10.Gg, 05.40.Fb