Characterisation of planar Brownian multiplicative chaos

Abstract

We characterise the multiplicative chaos measure $\mathcal{M}$ associated to planar Brownian motion introduced in [BBK94,AHS20,Jeg20a] by showing that it is the only random Borel measure satisfying a list of natural properties. These properties only serve to fix the average value of the measure and to express a spatial Markov property. As a consequence of our characterisation, we establish the scaling limit of the set of thick points of planar simple random walk, stopped at the first exit time of a domain, by showing the weak convergence towards $\mathcal{M}$ of the point measure associated to the thick points. In particular, we obtain the convergence of the appropriately normalised number of thick points of random walk to a nondegenerate random variable. The normalising constant is different from that of the Gaussian free field, as conjectured in [Jeg20b]. These results cover the entire subcritical regime. A key new idea for this characterisation is to introduce measures describing the intersection between different Brownian trajectories and how they interact to create thick points.