Random walk reflected off of infinity, with applications to uniform spanning forests and supercritical Liouville quantum gravity

Let $\mathcal G$ be an infinite graph -- not necessarily one-ended -- on which the simple random walk is transient. We define a variant of the continuous-time random walk on $\mathcal G$ which reaches $\infty$ in finite time and "reflects off of $\infty$" infinitely many times. We show that the Aldous-Broder algorithm for the random walk reflected off of $\infty$ gives the free uniform spanning forest (FUSF) on $\mathcal G$. Furthermore, Wilson's algorithm for the random walk reflected off of $\infty$ gives the FUSF on $\mathcal G$ on the event that the FUSF is connected, but not in general. We also apply the theory of random walk reflected off of $\infty$ to study random planar maps in the universality class of supercritical Liouville quantum gravity (LQG), equivalently LQG with central charge in $(1,25)$. Such random planar maps are infinite, with uncountably many ends. We define a version of the Tutte embedding for such maps under which they conjecturally converge to LQG. We also make several conjectures regarding the qualitative behavior of stochastic processes on such maps -- including the FUSF and critical percolation.

Publication Details

Journal
ArXiv.org
Published
2025-06-23
Primary Topic
Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics
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article
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article

Random walk reflected off of infinity, with applications to uniform spanning forests and supercritical Liouville quantum gravity

ArXiv.org
Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics
article

Random walk reflected off of infinity, with applications to uniform spanning forests and supercritical Liouville quantum gravity

article en

Abstract

Let $\mathcal G$ be an infinite graph -- not necessarily one-ended -- on which the simple random walk is transient. We define a variant of the continuous-time random walk on $\mathcal G$ which reaches $\infty$ in finite time and "reflects off of $\infty$" infinitely many times. We show that the Aldous-Broder algorithm for the random walk reflected off of $\infty$ gives the free uniform spanning forest (FUSF) on $\mathcal G$. Furthermore, Wilson's algorithm for the random walk reflected off of $\infty$ gives the FUSF on $\mathcal G$ on the event that the FUSF is connected, but not in general. We also apply the theory of random walk reflected off of $\infty$ to study random planar maps in the universality class of supercritical Liouville quantum gravity (LQG), equivalently LQG with central charge in $(1,25)$. Such random planar maps are infinite, with uncountably many ends. We define a version of the Tutte embedding for such maps under which they conjecturally converge to LQG. We also make several conjectures regarding the qualitative behavior of stochastic processes on such maps -- including the FUSF and critical percolation.

ArXiv.org
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Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics
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