For independent one-dimensional Brownian motions , the real and imaginary parts of are continuous local martingales with equal bracket and zero cross bracket. The Divergence of a driftless Brownian exponential clock makes , and the common-clock time change of orthogonal local martingales makes planar Brownian motion started at . The exponential never vanishes, proving that this Brownian motion never hits zero. Recurrent visits of to arbitrarily negative levels prove visits arbitrarily near zero at arbitrarily large Brownian times.
Cosine-exponential Brownian local martingale Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-25
For independent standard Brownian motions , Itô formula gives : the two second-order drifts cancel. Independence gives zero cross quadratic covariation, so the displayed bracket follows. The process itself is not Brownian because its bracket is random. Its inverse-bracket time change is Brownian motion starting at one, in the time-changed filtration; subtracting one gives standard Brownian motion. The Divergence of a driftless Brownian exponential clock guarantees that the inverse is finite at every new time.
For , use the clock . After the inverse time change, the Dambis-Dubins-Schwarz theorem gives
so the time-changed process is a Bessel process of dimension . Its lifetime is , which is finite almost surely exactly when .
Put . Its paths are continuous and strictly increasing. We also need to ensure that the printed inverse is finite for every .
Here is a duration argument for Divergence of a driftless Brownian exponential clock. Start at zero and choose successive return times to zero, each at least one time unit after the preceding return. Recurrence of one-dimensional Brownian motion makes all these times finite. By the Strong Markov property, each unit interval after has the same fixed positive probability that the Brownian path stays above . The intervals are disjoint, and repeated strong Markov conditioning makes these trials independent. Infinitely many succeed almost surely, by the Borel-Cantelli lemma. Each successful interval contributes at least to , proving divergence.
Therefore is the unique finite inverse of , with . It is an increasing family of stopping times, since . The continuous-local-martingale time-change theorem states that inverse-bracket time change preserves the local-martingale property in the filtration and transforms the bracket by composition. Applied to , this gives
The Lévy characterization of Brownian motion now proves that is Brownian motion starting at one; is standard Brownian motion, in the time-changed filtration. If the term Brownian motion is reserved for a process starting at zero, itself fails only that normalization. The substantive Brownian property, including independent Gaussian increments in the new time, holds.
For and , apply the two-variable Itô formula. Independence gives , while each individual bracket is . The second derivatives in the two variables cancel, yielding
Their integrands are continuous adapted and locally bounded, so both coordinates are continuous local martingales. The quadratic variation of a stochastic integral gives
Here is a full proof that the clock diverges. Let , and successively define
By recurrence of one-dimensional Brownian motion, all these times are finite almost surely. By the Strong Markov property at the returns , the variables are independent identically distributed, lie in almost surely, and have a strictly positive mean. The strong law of large numbers gives almost surely. On , , so
The segments are disjoint, and their divergent duration also ensures they cannot accumulate at a finite time. This proves Divergence of a driftless Brownian exponential clock and