Anomalous diffusion is a phenomenon that cannot be modeled accurately by second-order diffusion equations,but is better described by fractional diffusion models.The nonlocal nature of the fractional diffusion operators makes substantially more difficult the mathemati-cal analysis of these models and the establishment of suitable numerical schemes.This paper proposes and analyzes the first finite difference method for solving variable-coefficient one-dimensional(steady state)fractional differential equations(DEs)with two-sided fractional derivatives(FDs).The proposed scheme combines first-order forward and backward Euler methods for approximating the left-sided FD when the right-sided FD is approximated by two consecutive applications of the first-order backward Euler method.Our scheme reduces to the standard second-order central difference in the absence of FDs.The existence and uniqueness of the numerical solution are proved,and truncation errors of order h are demonstrated(h denotes the maximum space step size).The numerical tests illustrate the global 0(h)accu-racy,except for nonsmooth cases which,as expected,have deteriorated convergence rates.
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