Conditioning a Brownian loop-soup cluster on a portion of its boundary

Abstract

We show that if one conditions a cluster in a Brownian loop-soup $L$ (of any intensity) in a two-dimensional domain by a portion $l$ of its outer boundary, then in the remaining domain, the union of all the loops of $L$ that touch $l$ satisfies the conformal restriction property while the other loops in $L$ form an independent loop-soup. This result holds when one discovers $l$ in a natural Markovian way, such as in the exploration procedures that have been defined in order to actually construct the Conformal Loop Ensembles as outer boundaries of loop-soup clusters. This result implies among other things that a phase transition occurs at c = 14/15 for the connectedness of the loops that touch $l$. Our results can be viewed as an extension of some of the results in our earlier paper in the following two directions: There, a loop-soup cluster was conditioned on its entire outer boundary while we discover here only part of this boundary. And, while it was explained there that the strong decomposition using a Poisson point process of excursions that we derived there should be specific to the case of the critical loop-soup, we show here that in the subcritical cases, a weaker property involving the conformal restriction property nevertheless holds.