Liouville quantum gravity and the Brownian map III: the conformal structure is determined

Abstract

AbstractPrevious works in this series have shown that an instance of a $$\sqrt{8/3}$$ 8 / 3 -Liouville quantum gravity (LQG) sphere has a well-defined distance function, and that the resulting metric measure space (mm-space) agrees in law with the Brownian map (TBM). In this work, we show that given just the mm-space structure, one can a.s. recover the LQG sphere. This implies that there is a canonical way to parameterize an instance of TBM by the Euclidean sphere (up to Möbius transformation). In other words, an instance of TBM has a canonical conformal structure. The conclusion is that TBM and the $$\sqrt{8/3}$$ 8 / 3 -LQG sphere are equivalent. They ultimately encode the same structure (a topological sphere with a measure, a metric, and a conformal structure) and have the same law. From this point of view, the fact that the conformal structure a.s. determines the metric and vice-versa can be understood as a property of this unified law. The results of this work also imply that the analogous facts hold for Brownian and $$\sqrt{8/3}$$ 8 / 3 -LQG surfaces with other topologies.