A Lévy measure on the real line is a nonnegative Borel measure satisfying
It records the intensity per unit time of jumps of a Lévy process. Under the additional small-jump first-moment condition, the uncompensated Lévy–Khintchine formula is
where and . The integral is absolutely convergent: near zero its integrand has absolute value at most , while outside a neighborhood of zero it is at most and has finite mass. If the usual compensated Lévy–Khintchine formula uses drift , this convention has .
A Lévy process starts at zero and has stationary independent increments and stochastic continuity. Its characteristic function at time is , with and continuous. The given time-one characteristic function is strictly positive. It therefore has the unique continuous logarithm vanishing at zero,
Any other continuous exponent would differ by an integer multiple of ; continuity on the real line and the value at zero make that integer identically zero. This determines all increment laws. More explicitly, for ,
Thus it determines every finite-dimensional distribution. For the standard càdlàg version of a Lévy process, coordinates at rational times determine the path, so these laws determine the entire process law on its canonical path space as well.
To find the Lévy measure, try the symmetric density . Its jump exponent is
Differentiation under the integral is justified by the integrable bound . The elementary Fourier sine transform gives
Since , integration in yields . Choosing matches the prescribed exponent exactly. This is the Lévy measure of a symmetric Laplace time-one law:
The candidate satisfies the Lévy measure condition because its density is of order near zero and decays exponentially at infinity; moreover . Uniqueness of the triplet in the Lévy–Khintchine formula proves that these are the required coefficients. The infinite mass near zero means infinitely many small jumps, not a Gaussian component; their total variation is finite on bounded time intervals because .