A mating-of-trees approach for graph distances in random planar maps (Q783800)

A planar map is a graph embedded in the plane (it is more common in the planar map literature to define a planar map to be a graph embedded in the 2-sphere, rater than in the plane). The goal of this paper is to set up a general framework for proving estimates for a certain family of random planar maps in the \(\gamma\)-LQG (\(\gamma\)-Liouville quantum gravity) universality class for \(\gamma\in (0, 2]\) and apply this framework to obtain estimates for graph distances on these maps (see Section 1.4). The family of planar maps are those which can be encoded by a two-dimensional random walk with i.i.d. increments via a so-called mating-of-trees bijection (the reason for the name is that these bijections can be interpreted as gluing together two discrete trees). It includes the uniform infinite planar triangulation. The results of this paper can also be used to prove other results for random planar maps. The authors provide some background on distances in random planar maps, define mated-CRT (a random planar map constructed from a correlated two dimensional Brownian motion) maps. The paper [the first author and \textit{J. Pfeffer}, Electron. Commun. Probab. 24, Paper No. 56, 12 p. (2019; Zbl 1459.60022)] generalized some results of the present paper, see also [the first author et al., Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 173, No. 3--4, 931--997 (2019; Zbl 1429.83022)]. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 contains the core of the argument for comparing graph distances for mated-CRT maps and other random planar maps. Section 3 reviews the mating-of-trees bijections for several particular random planar maps, then the authors use the results of Section 2 to deduce the main results. Section 4 discusses some open problems.