Probabilistic representation of the gradient of a killed diffusion semigroup: The half-space case

Abstract

We introduce a probabilistic representation of the derivative of the semigroup associated to a multidimensional killed diffusion process defined on the half-space. The semigroup derivative is expressed as a functional of a process that is normally reflected when it hits the hyperplane. The representation of the derivative also involves a matrix-valued process which replaces the Jacobian of the underlying process that appears in the traditional pathwise derivative of a classical diffusion. The components of this matrix-valued process become zero except for those on the first row every time the reflected process touches the boundary. The results in this paper extend those in recent work of the authors, where the one-dimensional case was studied.