Annulus crossing formulae for critical planar percolation

Abstract

We derive exact formulae for three basic annulus crossing events for the critical planar Bernoulli percolation in the continuum limit. The first is for the probability that there is an open path connecting the two boundaries of an annulus of inner radius $r$ and outer radius $R$. The second is for the probability that there are both open and closed paths connecting the two annulus boundaries. These two results were predicted by Cardy based on non-rigorous Coulomb gas arguments. Our third result gives the probability that there are two disjoint open paths connecting the two boundaries. Its leading asymptotic as $r/R\to 0$ is captured by the so-called backbone exponent, a transcendental number recently determined by Nolin, Qian and two of the authors. This exponent is the unique real root to the equation $\frac{\sqrt{36 x +3}}{4} + \sin (\frac{2 \pi \sqrt{12 x +1}}{3} ) =0$, other than $-\frac{1}{12}$ and $\frac{1}{4}$. Besides these three real roots, this equation has countably many complex roots. Our third result shows that these roots appear exactly as exponents of the subleading terms in the crossing formula. This suggests that the backbone exponent is part of a conformal field theory (CFT) whose bulk spectrum contains this set of roots. Expanding the same crossing probability as $r/R\to 1$, we obtain a series with logarithmic corrections at every order, suggesting that the backbone exponent is related to a logarithmic boundary CFT. Our proofs are based on the coupling between SLE curves and Liouville quantum gravity (LQG). The key is to encode the annulus crossing probabilities by the random moduli of certain LQG surfaces with annular topology, whose law can be extracted from the dependence of the LQG annuli partition function on their boundary lengths.