Reversible diffusion

Reversible diffusions have an elegant characterization due to the Russian mathematician Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov.

Let B denote a d-dimensional standard Brownian motion; let b : Rd → Rd be a Lipschitz continuous vector field.

Let X : [0, +∞) × Ω → Rd be an Itō diffusion defined on a probability space (Ω, Σ, P) and solving the Itō stochastic differential equation

with square-integrable initial condition, i.e. X0 ∈ L2(Ω, Σ, P; Rd).

Then the following are equivalent: (Of course, the condition that b be the negative of the gradient of Φ only determines Φ up to an additive constant; this constant may be chosen so that exp(−2Φ(·)) is a probability density function with integral 1.)