On the chemical distance exponent for the two-sided level-set of the 2D Gaussian free field

Abstract: In this paper we introduce the two-sided level-set for the two-dimensional discrete Gaussian free field. Then we investigate the chemical distance for the two-sided level-set percolation. Our result shows that the chemical distance should have dimension strictly larger than $1$, which in turn stimulates some tempting questions about the two-sided level-set.