Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2005 iii Paper 34 5 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Allow to take the value . Fix a closed ball , independently choose a radius with density on , and let be the first time the Brownian motion from reaches that radius. Conditional on , the Strong Markov property at decomposes the remaining Brownian exit time from . Since and the conditional exit time has mean , Tonelli's theorem and part (a) give the Brownian exit-time ball averaging identityThis identity is valid in the extended nonnegative reals; no finiteness was assumed to derive it.
If , the integral over is finite. For any choose with . The same identity at has a finite right side because its integral is over a subset of the integrable ball. Thus . The set is therefore open relative to .
It is also relatively closed. If converges to , choose with . For large , , and . The preceding argument shows that every point in , including , belongs to . Hence is closed in . Since is nonempty and is connected, for every . This proves finiteness propagation of Brownian mean exit times without assuming beforehand that solves a smooth Poisson equation.