Cauchy exit law from a Brownian half-plane 2026-10-14
Planar Brownian motion started at exits the left half-plane with ordinate distributed as times a standard Cauchy random variable. Conditional on the independent horizontal hitting time, the ordinate is normal with variance equal to that time. The inverse-square Gaussian law of Brownian first passage turns this into a ratio of independent standard normals. Its exit density is .
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2008 iii Paper 37 4 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
The Brownian reflection principle gives, for ,For a standard normal random variable , this is also . Thus the inverse-square Gaussian law of Brownian first passage isIn particular, is finite almost surely.
The Brownian motions are independent, so conditional on , the ordinate has the same distribution as , with a standard normal independent of the random time. By Brownian scaling and the hitting-time identity,The last equality uses symmetry of and independence of : inserting the independent sign of does not change the distribution of the numerator. ThereforeFor completeness, the ratio has density , where is the standard normal density. The scaled exit ordinate has density .