This work explores the possibility of developing the analog of some classic results from elliptic PDEs for a class of fractional ODEs involving the composition of both left- and right-sided Riemann-Liouville (R-L) fractional derivatives, $${D^\alpha _{a+}}{D^\beta _{b-}}$$
D
a
+
α
D
b
-
β
, $$1<\alpha +\beta <2$$
1
<
α
+
β
<
2
. Compared to one-sided non-local R-L derivatives, these composite operators are completely non-local, which means that the evaluation of $${D^\alpha _{a+}}{D^\beta _{b-}}u(x)$$
D
a
+
α
D
b
-
β
u
(
x
)
at a point x will have to retrieve the information not only to the left of x all the way to the left boundary but also to the right up to the right boundary, simultaneously. Therefore, only limited tools can be applied to such a situation, which is the most challenging part of the work. To overcome this, we do the analysis from a non-traditional perspective and eventually establish elliptic-type results, including Hopf’s Lemma and maximum principles. As $$\alpha \rightarrow 1^-$$
α
→
1
-
or $$\alpha ,\beta \rightarrow 1^-$$
α
,
β
→
1
-
, those operators reduce to the one-sided fractional diffusion operator and the classic diffusion operator, respectively. For these reasons, we still refer to them as “elliptic diffusion operators", however, without any physical interpretation.