Past exam of the stochastic differential equations and Brownian motion in complex analysis course of the University of Oxford / 2010 / B / 6 / a

Use first that planar Brownian motion avoids a fixed point, so the path starting at $1$ never reaches zero. Its continuous logarithmic lift, initialized at zero, has real part $U_t=\log |Z_t|$ and imaginary part the continuous unwrapped angle ${\Theta }_t$. Local branches of the complex logarithm, patched along the path, and the Itô formula show that both coordinates are continuous local martingales withThe clock is finite on every compact time interval, since a continuous nonvanishing path stays a positive distance from zero there. It is continuous and strictly increasing. Moreover $\tau (\infty )=\infty$: by recurrence, planar Brownian motion spends infinite total time in a fixed disk, and inside the unit disk the clock integrand is at least one. This is the divergence of a positive planar Brownian occupation integral.

The common-clock time change of orthogonal local martingales, using the Lévy characterization of multidimensional Brownian motion, supplies independent Brownian coordinates ${\zeta }^1,{\zeta }^2$ such that $U_t+i{\Theta }_t={\zeta }_{\tau (t)}$. Exponentiating givesTo identify the inverse clock, write $A={\tau }^{-1}$. The derivative of an inverse function and the representation just obtained giveConsequentlyThe strict inequality in this generalized inverse has the same infimum as the unique inverse value, since $A$ is continuous and strictly increasing onto the half-line.