Liouville quantum gravity as a mating of trees. (English) Zbl 1503.60003
Astérisque 427. Paris: Société Mathématique de France (SMF) (ISBN 978-2-85629-941-8/pbk). viii, 257 p. (2021).
Summary: There is a simple way to “glue together” a coupled pair of continuum random trees (CRTs) to produce a topological sphere. The sphere comes equipped with a measure and a space-filling curve (which describes the “interface” between the trees). We present an explicit and canonical way to embed the sphere in \(\mathbb C\cup \{\infty\}\). In this embedding, the measure is Liouville quantum gravity (LQG) with parameter \(\gamma \in (0,2)\), and the curve is space-filling \(\mathrm{SLE}_{\kappa'}\) with \(\kappa' =16/\gamma^2\). Achieving this requires us to develop an extensive suite of tools for working with LQG surfaces. We explain how to conformally weld so-called “quantum wedges” to obtain new quantum wedges of different weights. We construct finite-volume quantum disks and spheres of various types, and give a Poissonian description of the set of quantum disks cut off by a boundary-intersecting \(\mathrm{SLE}_{\kappa}\) process with \(\kappa \in(0,4)\). We also establish a Lévy tree description of the set of quantum disks to the left (or right) of an \(\mathrm{SLE}_{\kappa'}\) with \(\kappa' \in (4,8)\). We show that given two such trees, sampled independently, there is a.s. a canonical way to “zip them together” and recover the \(\mathrm{SLE}_{\kappa'}\). The law of the CRT pair we study was shown in an earlier paper to be the scaling limit of the discrete tree/dual-tree pair associated to an FK-decorated random planar map (RPM). Together, these results imply that FK-decorated RPM scales to CLE-decorated LQG in a certain “tree structure” topology.
MSC:
60-02 | Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to probability theory |
60D05 | Geometric probability and stochastic geometry |
82B20 | Lattice systems (Ising, dimer, Potts, etc.) and systems on graphs arising in equilibrium statistical mechanics |
82B41 | Random walks, random surfaces, lattice animals, etc. in equilibrium statistical mechanics |
60J67 | Stochastic (Schramm-)Loewner evolution (SLE) |