We consider the development and analysis of local discontinuous Galerkin methods for fractional diffusion problems in one space dimension, characterized by having fractional derivatives, parameterized by β ∈[1, 2]. After demonstrating that a classic approach fails to deliver optimal order of convergence, we introduce a modified local numerical flux which exhibits optimal order of convergence 𝒪(hk + 1) uniformly across the continuous range between pure advection (β = 1) and pure diffusion...