On the heat kernel and the Dirichlet form of Liouville Brownian Motion

Abstract

In \cite{GRV}, a Feller process called Liouville Brownian motion on $\R^2$ has been introduced. It can be seen as a Brownian motion evolving in a random geometry given formally by the exponential of a (massive) Gaussian Free Field $e^{\gamma X}$ and is the right diffusion process to consider regarding 2d-Liouville quantum gravity. In this note, we discuss the construction of the associated Dirichlet form, following essentially \cite{fuku} and the techniques introduced in \cite{GRV}. Then we carry out the analysis of the Liouville resolvent. In particular, we prove that it is strong Feller, thus obtaining the existence of the Liouville heat kernel via a non-trivial theorem of Fukushima and al. One of the motivations which led to introduce the Liouville Brownian motion in \cite{GRV} was to investigate the puzzling Liouville metric through the eyes of this new stochastic process. One possible approach was to use the theory developed for example in \cite{stollmann,sturm1,sturm2}, whose aim is to capture the "geometry" of the underlying space out of the Dirichlet form of a process living on that space. More precisely, under some mild hypothesis on the regularity of the Dirichlet form, they provide an intrinsic metric which is interpreted as an extension of Riemannian geometry applicable to non differential structures. We prove that the needed mild hypotheses are satisfied but that the associated intrinsic metric unfortunately vanishes, thus showing that renormalization theory remains out of reach of the metric aspect of Dirichlet forms.