For a compact H-hull whose closure avoids a real boundary point , the Brownian excursion in the upper half-plane from to infinity avoids with the displayed probability. From an interior point , the corresponding Doob h-transform avoidance probability is . Letting approach the boundary and using the Schwarz reflection principle gives the derivative. In particular at every regular real boundary point away from the hull.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2018 iii Paper 203 4 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
A Brownian excursion in the upper half-plane from to infinity is killed planar Brownian motion conditioned to stay in , with its entrance law at . Precisely, it is the Doob h-transform for , obtained by starting at and letting . Equivalently,where is standard Brownian motion and the independent process is a dimension-three Bessel process started at zero. The transformed generator is , which explains this representation.
First compute avoidance from an interior point . Let be the exit time of ordinary planar Brownian motion from . The harmonic correctionhas boundary values on and zero on the real axis. The hydrodynamic normalization at infinity gives . Together with the maximum principle for harmonic functions this gives the useful bound . Since ordinary Brownian motion hits the real axis almost surely, the optional stopping theorem applied to this bounded harmonic function givesThe Doob h-transform weights a stopped path by its final height divided by its initial height. Applying this at the first hit of , with bounded-time localization and then a limit, therefore yieldsFor the entrance law the same result follows by conditioning at a small positive time and letting that time decrease to zero: the avoidance function has the boundary limit computed next, and the excursion is initially in a neighbourhood disjoint from .
Because the closure of the hull avoids , the Schwarz reflection principle makes analytic in a neighbourhood of zero, with real and positive real . ThusIn fact, the reflected Taylor expansion gives uniformly as inside the half-plane, so the same limit applies to the entrance process. The map in the question is , so its derivative agrees with . We obtain the restriction probability of a Brownian half-plane excursion:
For a compact H-hull avoiding zero, let map its complement to the half-plane, fix zero, and have derivative one at infinity. The Brownian excursion in the upper half-plane avoids with probability . From an interior starting point , the corresponding transformed process avoids with probability ; taking and gives the boundary derivative.