Two dimensional percolation and Liouville quantum gravity

Smirnov's proof of Cardy's formula for percolation on the triangular lattice leads to a discrete approximation of conformal maps, which we call the Cardy-Smirnov embedding. Under this embedding, Holden and I proved that the uniform triangulation converge to a continuum random geometry called pure Liouville quantum gravity. There is a variant of the Gaussian free field governing the random geometry, which is an important example of conformal field theory called Liouville CFT. A key motivation for understanding Liouville quantum gravity rigorously is its application to the evaluation of scaling exponents and dimensions for 2D critical systems such as percolation. Recently, with Nolin, Qian and Zhuang, we used this idea and the integrable structure of Liouville CFT to derive a scaling exponent for planar percolation called the backbone exponent, which was unknown for several decades.