Planar maps, circle patterns and 2D gravity (Q407406)

Summary: Via circle pattern techniques, random planar triangulations (with angle variables) are mapped onto Delaunay triangulations in the complex plane. The uniform measure on triangulations is mapped onto a conformally invariant spatial point process. We show that this measure can be expressed as: {\parindent=6mm \begin{itemize}\item[(1)] a sum over 3-spanning-trees partitions of the edges of the Delaunay triangulations; \item[(2)] the volume form of a Kähler metric over the space of Delaunay triangulations, whose prepotential has a simple formulation in term of ideal tessellations of the 3d hyperbolic space \(\mathbb H_3\);\item[(3)] a discretized version (involving finite difference complex derivative operators \(\nabla,\bar\nabla\)) of Polyakov's conformal Faddeev-Popov determinant in 2d gravity;\item[(4)] a combination of Chern classes, thus also establishing a link with topological 2d gravity. \end{itemize}}