 Three-dimensional Bessel process

The radial part of three-dimensional Brownian motion started away from the origin is a Bessel process of dimension three. The radial Laplacian is $\Delta |x|=2/|x|$, so the Itô formula gives the displayed equation. The radial martingale has unit quadratic variation rate and is Brownian motion by the Lévy characterization of Brownian motion. The reciprocal $1/R$ is a local martingale. Stopping it on $(\epsilon ,M)$ gives ${\mathbb{P}}_x(T_{\epsilon }<T_M)=\epsilon (M-x)/(x(M-\epsilon ))$. Letting $\epsilon \downarrow 0$ shows that zero is not hit.