A contour line of the continuum Gaussian free field

Oded Schramm, Scott Sheffield

Published 2010-08-14Version 1

Consider an instance $h$ of the Gaussian free field on a simply connected planar domain with boundary conditions $-\lambda$ on one boundary arc and $\lambda$ on the complementary arc, where $\lambda$ is the special constant $\sqrt{\pi/8}$. We argue that even though $h$ is defined only as a random distribution, and not as a function, it has a well-defined zero contour line connecting the endpoints of these arcs, whose law is SLE(4). We construct this contour line in two ways: as the limit of the chordal zero contour lines of the projections of $h$ onto certain spaces of piecewise linear functions, and as the only path-valued function on the space of distributions with a natural Markov property.