Stochastic quantization of Liouville conformal field theory

Abstract: We study a nonlinear stochastic heat equation forced by a space-time white noise on closed surfaces, with nonlinearity $e^{\beta u}$. This equation corresponds to the stochastic quantization of the Liouville quantum gravity (LQG) measure. (i) We first revisit the construction of the LQG measure in Liouville conformal field theory (LCFT) in the $L^2$ regime $0<\beta<\sqrt{2}$. This uniformizes in this regime the approaches of David-Kupiainen-Rhodes-Vargas (2016), David-Rhodes-Vargas (2016) and Guillarmou-Rhodes-Vargas (2019) which treated the case of a closed surface with genus 0, 1 and $> 1$ respectively. Moreover, our argument shows that this measure is independent of the approximation procedure for a large class of smooth approximations. (ii) We prove almost sure global well-posedness of the parabolic stochastic dynamics, and invariance of the measure under this stochastic flow. In particular, our results improve previous results obtained by Garban (2020) in the cases of the sphere and the torus with their canonical metric, and are new in the case of closed surfaces with higher genus.