Liouville Theory and the Weil-Petersson Geometry of Moduli Space

Abstract

Liouville theory describes the dynamics of surfaces with constant negative curvature and can be used to study the Weil-Petersson geometry of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces. This leads to an efficient algorithm to compute the Weil--Petersson metric to arbitrary accuracy using Zamolodchikov's recursion relation for conformal blocks. For example, we compute the metric on $\mathcal M_{0,4}$ numerically to high accuracy by considering Liouville theory on a sphere with four punctures. We numerically compute the eigenvalues of the Weil-Petersson Laplacian, and find evidence that the obey the statistics of a random matrix in the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble.