International Journal of Differential Equations
Volume 2010 (2010), Article ID 649486, 10 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/649486
Research Article

Solvability of Nonlinear Langevin Equation Involving Two Fractional Orders with Dirichlet Boundary Conditions

1Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University, P.O. Box 80203, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
2Departamento de Análisis Matemático, Facultad de Matemáticas, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Received 8 August 2009; Accepted 14 November 2009

Academic Editor: Nikolai Leonenko

Copyright © 2010 Bashir Ahmad and Juan J. Nieto. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We study a Dirichlet boundary value problem for Langevin equation involving two fractional orders. Langevin equation has been widely used to describe the evolution of physical phenomena in fluctuating environments. However, ordinary Langevin equation does not provide the correct description of the dynamics for systems in complex media. In order to overcome this problem and describe dynamical processes in a fractal medium, numerous generalizations of Langevin equation have been proposed. One such generalization replaces the ordinary derivative by a fractional derivative in the Langevin equation. This gives rise to the fractional Langevin equation with a single index. Recently, a new type of Langevin equation with two different fractional orders has been introduced which provides a more flexible model for fractal processes as compared with the usual one characterized by a single index. The contraction mapping principle and Krasnoselskii's fixed point theorem are applied to prove the existence of solutions of the problem in a Banach space.