For the SLE angle process, the bounded Dirichlet problem on the unbounded surviving domain has data on the intrinsic boundary mapped to the left of the Loewner driving function and zero on the boundary mapped to its right. For a simple Loewner trace these are its left and right banks, with the negative and positive real rays respectively. The tip is a discontinuity point of the boundary data.
Use the Chordal Loewner equation with Loewner driving function , and set . Before the Loewner swallowing time,
The upper-half-plane branch of the logarithm has imaginary part . The Itô formula gives
and therefore the SLE angle process satisfies
At the drift vanishes. Since , the stopped local martingale is a true bounded martingale, and the SLE4 angle martingale is global for each fixed point almost surely, using fixed-interior-point avoidance of SLE4 for the simple parameter-four Loewner trace.
Conversely, take . If this semimartingale were a local martingale, uniqueness of its finite-variation decomposition would force throughout every compact interval before swallowing. Because , for this would force to be identically zero on such an interval. Its Brownian component has quadratic variation , which makes that impossible. Thus for positive , the martingale parameter is exactly four.
If the degenerate value is admitted, there is one exception to a fixed-point reading of the assertion: for on the positive imaginary axis the deterministic flow stays on that axis until swallowing, and is constant. For all starting points simultaneously, the unique parameter giving the martingale property is still four.
Before the Loewner swallowing time , put and . The Itô formula applied to the holomorphic logarithm in the complex upper half-plane gives
Taking imaginary parts yields the SLE angle process
For the drift vanishes, so
is a continuous local martingale. Since , every localized stopped version is a bounded true martingale. After resolving the lifetime issue below, the dominated convergence theorem applied to conditional expectations removes localization and gives a true bounded martingale.
For completeness, there is no finite lifetime ambiguity for a fixed interior in this parameter range. The preceding Bessel process and Conformal Markov property of SLE argument gives a simple trace staying in the interior, so no point is swallowed in a disconnected pocket. If were finite, the trace would have to reach , forcing the Loewner conformal radius to tend to zero by the Koebe quarter theorem. But
The Dambis-Dubins-Schwarz theorem says that a bounded continuous local martingale cannot have infinite quadratic variation before a finite terminal time: that would require a Brownian motion to stay in a bounded interval for all clock times. Therefore cannot tend to zero at a finite , a contradiction. Thus almost surely for each fixed . This proves the SLE4 angle martingale assertion: the angle is a bounded continuous martingale. In particular . The upper-half-plane branch of the argument is used throughout.
SLE4 angle martingale Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
For a fixed interior point and parameter four, the SLE angle process has zero drift and satisfies . Its values in make this continuous local martingale a true bounded martingale. The identity , together with the Dambis-Dubins-Schwarz theorem, prevents its Loewner conformal radius from vanishing at a finite lifetime. Since the parameter-four trace is simple and does not meet the real boundary at positive times, finite swallowing would require a visit to the point and vanishing radius. Thus its Loewner swallowing time is infinite almost surely. This gives a global continuous bounded martingale, not just one defined before swallowing.