Compact Brownian surfaces. I: Brownian disks (Q525093)

There has been in recent years a great deal of interest about random maps leading to the notion of Brownian map. A main result was the convergence in distribution for the Gromov-Hausdorff topology of rescaled random maps to a limiting random metric space, called the Brownian map, that is homeomorphic to the sphere and independent of the model for a large family of random maps. The first result in the paper under review is the convergence in distribution of a rescaled set of quadrangulations on the sphere with a boundary to a random metric space \(BD_L\), which is called the Brownian disk with perimeter \(L\), where \(L\in [0,\infty)\) is a parameter in the scaling. It is proved that when \(L=0\), \(BD_L\) is the Brownian map, and when \(L>0\), \(BD_L\) is homeomorphic to the closed unit disk in the plane, its Hausdorff dimension is 4, that of its boundary \(\partial BD_L\) is 2. The authors are also interested in the universality of the spaces \(BD_L\). With this aim, they introduce critical bipartite Boltzmann maps, where a Boltzmann measure associated with a sequence of nonnegative weights is defined on the set of rooted plane maps with faces all having even degrees. They obtain convergence to a \(BD_L\) for some choice of scaling. All these results concern the disk topology and will be used in a forthcoming paper for more general compact Brownian surfaces.