We study the structure of the Liouville quantum gravity (LQG) surfaces that are cut out as one explores a conformal loop-ensemble for in (4, 8) that is drawn on an independent -LQG surface for . The results are similar in flavor to the ones from our companion paper dealing with for in (8/3, 4), where the loops of the CLE are disjoint and simple. In particular, we encode the combined structure of the LQG surface and the in terms of stable growth-fragmentation trees or their variants, which also appear in the asymptotic study of peeling processes on decorated planar maps. This has consequences for questions that do a priori not involve LQG surfaces: In our paper entitled "CLE Percolations" described the law of interfaces obtained when coloring the loops of a independently into two colors with respective probabilities p and . This description was complete up to one missing parameter . The results of the present paper about CLE on LQG allow us to determine its value in terms of p and . It shows in particular that and are related via a continuum analog of the Edwards-Sokal coupling between percolation and the q-state Potts model (which makes sense even for non-integer q between 1 and 4) if and only if . This provides further evidence for the long-standing belief that and represent the scaling limits of percolation and the q-Potts model when q and are related in this way. Another consequence of the formula for is the value of half-plane arm exponents for such divide-and-color models (a.k.a. fuzzy Potts models) that turn out to take a somewhat different form than the usual critical exponents for two-dimensional models.
Keywords: Conformal loop ensembles; Gaussian free field; Growth–fragmentation trees; Liouville quantum gravity; Percolation; Schramm–Loewner evolutions.
© The Author(s) 2021.