Open Access

Felix Höfling, Arthur Straube

• The translational motion of anisotropic and self-propelled colloidal particles is closely linked with the particle's orientation and its rotational Brownian motion. In the overdamped limit, the stochastic evolution of the orientation vector follows a diffusion process on the unit sphere and is characterised by an orientation-dependent ("multiplicative") noise. As a consequence, the corresponding Langevin equation attains different forms depending on whether Itō's or Stratonovich's stochastic calculus is used. We clarify that both forms are equivalent and derive them from a geometric construction of Brownian motion on the unit sphere, based on infinitesimal random rotations. Our approach suggests further a geometric integration scheme for rotational Brownian motion, which preserves the normalisation constraint of the orientation vector exactly. We show that a simple implementation of the scheme converges weakly at order 1 of the integration time step, and we outline an advanced variant of the scheme that is weakly exact for an arbitrarily large time step. The discussion is restricted to time-homogeneous rotational Brownian motion (i.e., constant rotational diffusion tensor), which is relevant for chemically anisotropic spheres such as self-propelled Janus particles.