Metric growth dynamics in Liouville quantum gravity

Julien Dubédat, Hugo Falconet

Published 2021-12-27, updated 2022-12-20Version 2

We consider the metric growth in Liouville quantum gravity (LQG) for $\gamma \in (0,2)$. We show that a process associated with the trace of the free field on the boundary of a filled LQG ball is stationary, for every $\gamma \in (0,2)$. The infinitesimal version of this stationarity combined with an explicit expression of the generator of the evolution of the trace field $(h_t)$ provides a formal invariance equation that a measure on trace fields must satisfy. When considering a modified process corresponding to an evolution of LQG surfaces, we prove that the invariance equation is satisfied by an explicit $\sigma$-finite measure on trace fields. This explicit measure on trace fields only corresponds to the pure gravity case. On the way to prove this invariance, we retrieve the specificity of both $\gamma = \sqrt{8/3}$ and of the LQG dimension $d_{\gamma} = 4$. In this case, we derive an explicit expression of the (nonsymmetric) Dirichlet form associated with the process $(h_t)$ and construct dynamics associated with its symmetric part.