Lévy characterization of multidimensional Brownian motion

ID: levy-characterization-of-multidimensional-brownian-motion

A continuous vector-valued local martingale starting at zero is standard multidimensional Brownian motion if its quadratic covariations satisfy . For each deterministic vector , the Itô formula makes a complex local martingale. Its absolute value is bounded on each finite horizon, so it is a true martingale. Its conditional expectation identity gives
This conditional characteristic function identifies a centered multivariate normal distribution with covariance , independent of the past. Thus the coordinates are independent Brownian motions. The converse follows immediately from the standard coordinate quadratic covariations.

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