  We study solution techniques for a linear-quadratic optimal control problem
involving fractional powers of elliptic operators. These fractional operators
can be realized as the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for a nonuniformly elliptic
problem posed on a semi-infinite cylinder in one more spatial dimension. Thus,
we consider an equivalent formulation with a nonuniformly elliptic operator as
state equation. The rapid decay of the solution to this problem suggests a
truncation that is suitable for numerical approximation. We discretize the
proposed truncated state equation using first degree tensor product finite
elements on anisotropic meshes. For the control problem we analyze two
approaches: one that is semi-discrete based on the so-called variational
approach, where the control is not discretized, and the other one is fully
discrete via the discretization of the control by piecewise constant functions.
For both approaches, we derive a priori error estimates with respect to the
degrees of freedom. Numerical experiments validate the derived error estimates
and reveal a competitive performance of anisotropic over quasi-uniform
refinement.
