Speaker
Description
We consider the Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE$_\kappa$) with $\kappa=4$, the critical value of $\kappa > 0$ at or below which SLE$_\kappa$ is a simple curve and above which it is self-intersecting. We show that the range of an SLE$_4$ curve is a.s. conformally removable. Such curves arise as the conformal welding of a pair of independent critical ($\gamma=2$) Liouville quantum gravity (LQG) surfaces along their boundaries and our result implies that this conformal welding is unique. In order to establish this result, we give a new sufficient condition for a set $X \subseteq {\mathbf C}$ to be conformally removable which applies in the case that $X$ is not necessarily the boundary of a simply connected domain. We will also describe how this theorem can be applied to obtain the conformal removability of the SLE$_\kappa$ curves for $\kappa \in (4,8)$ in the case that the adjacency graph of connected components of the complement is a.s. connected.
Based on joint work with Konstantinos Kavvadias and Lukas Schoug.
