The Tutte embedding of the Poisson-Voronoi tessellation of the Brownian disk converges to \(\sqrt{8/3}\)-Liouville quantum gravity (Q2304959)

A planar map is a graph together with an embedding into the plane so that no two edges cross. Two planar maps are considered to be equivalent if they differ by an orientation preserving homeomorphism of the plane. A planar map can be viewed as a metric measure space by equipping it with the graph distance and assigning each vertex one unit of mass. In recent years, there has been considerable progress in studying the large scale metric behavior of planar maps chosen uniformly at random. Of particular relevance to the present paper are the scaling limit results which give the convergence of uniformly random planar maps towards a continuous object in the Gromov-Hausdorff-Prokhorov topology. The first results of this type are [\textit{J.-F. Le Gall}, Ann. Probab. 41, No. 4, 2880--2960 (2013; Zbl 1282.60014)] and [\textit{G. Miermont}, Acta Math. 210, No. 2, 319--401 (2013; Zbl 1278.60124)]. In this case, the limiting object is a random metric measure space with the topology of the sphere, called the Brownian map. The works [Le Gall, loc. cit.] and [Miermont, loc. cit.] have been extended to uniformly random planar maps with several other topologies, including the disk, see [the first two authors, Ann. Inst. Henri Poincaré, Probab. Stat. 55, No. 1, 551--589 (2019; Zbl 1466.60019)], the plane and the half-plane. The limiting objects that one obtains are collectively known as Brownian surfaces. Liouville quantum gravity (LQG) is another theory of random surfaces. To define LQG, one starts with af law of Gaussian free field (GFF) \(h\) on a domain \(\mathcal D\) and then considers the random two-dimensional Riemannian manifold with metric tensor \(\exp\{\gamma\, h(z)\}\,(dx^2+ dy^2)\), where \(\gamma\in (0, 2]\) is a parameter. This definition does not make rigorous mathematical sense since \(h\) is a distribution and not a function. Making rigorous sense of various aspects of LQG has been a major topic of research in recent years. Generally, one writes \(\gamma\)-LQG to refer to LQG surfaces with parameter \(\gamma\). The special case \(\gamma={\sqrt{8/3}}\) has long been known to be special: \({\sqrt{8/3}}\)-LQG surfaces, like Brownian surfaces, and are also called pure LQG surfaces. In fact, in a recent series of works by the second two authors has shown that the Brownian map and the so-called \({\sqrt{8/3}}\)-LQG sphere are in some sense equivalent. The aim of the present paper is to construct the conformal structure of a Brownian surface in an explicit manner. The main result of the paper (Theorem 1.1) states that as \(\lambda\to \infty\) (\(\lambda\) fixed and then pick the Poisson point process with intensity measure given by \(\lambda\) times the area measure on the Brownian surface), the random walk on the adjacency graph of Voronoi cells converges modulo parametrization to a limiting continuous path. One can define the Tutte embedding of the adjacency graph of cells in terms of hitting probabilities for the simple random walk, and Theorem 1.2 states that this Tutte embedding converges to \({\sqrt{8/3}}\)-LQG in an appropriate sense as \(\lambda\to \infty\). The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives some notation and recall some facts about metric spaces and \({\sqrt{8/3}}\)-LQG surfaces. In Section 3, the authors prove Theorems 1.1 and 1.2 assuming that a certain moment bound for Voronoi cells is satisfied. In Section 4, the required moment bound is obtained. Section 5 discusses several open problems related to the results of the present paper. Appendix A contains the proofs of several elementary properties of Voronoi cells which follow from basic properties of Brownian surfaces.