Past exam of the quantum condensed matter course of the University of Cambridge 2008 Section A A4 a iii Solution Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
For an isotropic three-dimensional ideal walk, each Cartesian component contributes to the mean square. Keeping two components gives . The planar projection of an isotropic random vector therefore has , smaller than the unprojected planar ideal walk by . The corresponding two-dimensional Gaussian mean distance has the same ratio.