Classification of scaling limits of uniform quadrangulations with a boundary (Q2189452)

A planar map is a finite connected graph properly embedded in the 2-sphere. The faces of such a map are the connected components of the complement of its edges. A planar quadrangulation with a boundary is a particular planar map whose faces are incident to four edges, except possibly one distinguished face which may have an arbitrary (even) degree. In this paper, the authors are interested in scaling limits of planar maps taken uniformly at random among all quadrangulations with boundary when the size and (possibly) the perimeter of the map tend to infinity. They obtain a complete classification of possible scaling limits of such quadrangulations, as the boundary size tends to infinity. The limits are taken in the sense of the local Gromov-Hausdorff convergence. Depending on the asymptotic behavior of the boundary size and the choice of the scaling factor, they observe different limiting metric spaces. They construct two one-parameter families of metric spaces that appear as scaling limits: the Brownian half-plane with skewness parameter \(\theta\) and the infinite-volume Brownian disk of perimeter \(\sigma\). They also obtain various coupling and limit results clarifying the relation between these objects.