Geodesic networks in Liouville quantum gravity surfaces (Q2668206)

This paper provides a detailed study of the geodesics between typical points on a \emph{Liouville quantum gravity} (\(\gamma\)-LQG) surface with parameter \(\gamma\). This is a 2-dimensional Riemannian manifold with metric \(e^{\gamma h} (\mathrm{d}x^2 + \mathrm{d}y^2)\) where \(\gamma\) is (a variant of the) Gaussian free field on a domain \(U \subset \mathbb{C}\). The existence of the Riemannian metric is a non-trivial result and it is obtained as a weak limit of measures on \(U\) which come from the integration of \(h\) against the heat kernel on \(\mathbb{C}\). Similarly, the construction of the LQG metric is a non-trivial result. The paper shows a number of results on the LQG geodesics. Firstly, it shows for almost every \(z,w \in U\) there is at least one geodesic. For fixed \(z,w \in U\) almost surely there is a unique geodesic. More specifically, it shows that almost surely for any \(z\in \mathbb{C}\) there are either 1, 2 or 3 such geodesics between \(0\) and \(z\). The subset consisting of those \(z\in \mathbb{C}\) for which there are two distinct geodesics is dense in \(\mathbb{C}\) and its Hausdorff dimension is bounded. The density of the subset of \(z \in \mathbb{C}\) for which there are three geodesics from 0 to \(z\) is also proved and, moreover, it is also proved that this is countably infinite. The other main result of the paper is about the structure of the geodesic networks between two points \(z, w \in \mathbb{C}\). It is shown for almost all pairs \(z,w\) the geodesics between then have a unique crossing point. Finally, the last theorem shows the existence of an upper bound in the number of geodesics between any two points of \(\mathbb{C}\).