Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2009 ii Paper 3 6A Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
Let be the probability of occupying site after steps, with and . The master equation isWrite so that the limiting is a probability density. A Taylor expansion of this master equation givesThe weakly biased diffusion limit of a weakly biased random walk keeps and finite as , so . The limiting advection-diffusion equation isIts initial condition is the Dirac delta function at the origin. At finite spacing, the exact variance gained per step is . Thus a finite-step central limit theorem gives the variance-matched coefficient ; its difference from the displayed vanishes in the stated weak-bias diffusion limit of a weakly biased random walk. Keeping a fixed nonzero bias while taking diffusive space-time scaling would instead make diverge.