A glimpse of the conformal structure of random planar maps

Nicolas Curien

Published 2013-08-08, updated 2014-08-19Version 2

We present a way to study the conformal structure of random planar maps. The main idea is to explore the map along an SLE (Schramm--Loewner evolution) process of parameter $ \kappa = 6$ and to combine the locality property of the SLE_{6} together with the spatial Markov property of the underlying lattice in order to get a non-trivial geometric information. We follow this path in the case of the conformal structure of random triangulations with a boundary. Under a reasonable assumption called (*) that we have unfortunately not been able to verify, we prove that the limit of uniformized random planar triangulations has a fractal boundary measure of Hausdorff dimension $\frac{1}{3}$ almost surely. This agrees with the physics KPZ predictions and represents a first step towards a rigorous understanding of the links between random planar maps and the Gaussian free field (GFF).