Archimedes' principle for Brownian liquid

Abstract

We consider a family of hard core objects moving as independent Brownian motions confined to a vessel by reflection. These are subject to gravitational forces modeled by drifts. The stationary distribution for the process has many interesting implications, including an illustration of the Archimedes' principle. The analysis rests on constructing reflecting Brownian motion with drift in a general open connected domain and studying its stationary distribution. In dimension two we utilize known results about sphere packing.