Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/iii/paper-344/2/d/solution

Put . The noises required by a joint trajectory are and . Their independent Gaussian white noise weights give the joint path probability of an order parameter and its flux:
For the physically reversed path, is time-even and the transport flux is time-odd. Therefore , , and
The common factor includes the two noise normalizations and the midpoint Jacobian determinant. Its calculation must include both relaxation channels. On a finite spatial grid, let and represent the divergence and gradient, with the discrete Laplacian, and let be the Hessian matrix of at the midpoint of time step . Differentiating the two required noises with respect to the next configuration and the interval flux gives the Jacobian matrix
Using the Schur complement, its Jacobian determinant, apart from the path-independent power of , is
Reversal visits the same midpoint configurations in reverse order, so the product of these factors is unchanged. The joint time-reversal invariance of a path Jacobian therefore involves the complete relaxation operator .
Taking the action difference gives
Repeated component indices are summed. The second squared norm sums over both flux indices. This is mixed conserved and nonconserved order-parameter dynamics; reversing the order parameter history while leaving the flux unreversed would give the wrong probability ratio.

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