Torsional rigidity for regions with a Brownian boundary

Abstract

Let $T^m$ be the $m$-dimensional unit torus, $m\in N$. The torsional rigidity of an open set $\Omega \subset T^m$ is the integral with respect to Lebesgue measure over all starting points $x\in \Omega$ of the expected lifetime in $\Omega$ of a Brownian motion starting at $x$. In this paper we consider $\Omega =T^m\backslash \beta [0,t]$, the complement of the path $\beta [0,t]$ of an independent Brownian motion up to time $t$. We compute the leading order asymptotic behaviour of the expectation of the torsional rigidity in the limit as $t\to \infty$. For $m=2$ the main contribution comes from the components in $T^2\backslash \beta [0,t]$ whose inradius is comparable to the largest inradius, while for $m=3$ most of $T^3\backslash \beta [0,t]$ contributes. A similar result holds for $m\ge 4$ after the Brownian path is replaced by a shrinking Wiener sausage $W_{r(t)}[0,t]$ of radius $r(t)=o(t^{-1/(m-2)})$, provided the shrinking is slow enough to ensure that the torsional rigidity tends to zero. Asymptotic properties of the capacity of $\beta [0,t]$ in $R^3$ and $W_1[0,t]$ in $R^m$, $m\ge 4$, play a central role throughout the paper. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the geometry of the complement of Brownian motion on $T^m$, which has received a lot of attention in the literature in past years.

26 pages, 1 figure