Dynamical Liouville

The aim of this paper is to analyze an SPDE which arises naturally in the context of Liouville quantum gravity. This SPDE shares some common features with the so-called Sine-Gordon equation and is built to preserve the Liouville measure which has been constructed recently on the two-dimensional sphere $S^2$ and the torus $T^2$ in the work by David-Kupiainen-Rhodes-Vargas. The SPDE we shall focus on has the following (simplified) form: $$p_t X = \frac 1 {4\pi} \Delta X - e^{\gamma X} + \xi\,,$$ where $\xi$ is a space-time white noise on $R_+ \times S^2$ or $R_+ \times T^2$. The main aspect which distinguishes this singular stochastic SPDE with well-known SPDEs studied recently (KPZ, dynamical $\Phi^4_3$, dynamical Sine-Gordon, etc.) is the presence of intermittency. One way of picturing this effect is that a naive rescaling argument suggests the above SPDE is sub-critical for all $\gamma>0$, while we don't expect solutions to exist when $\gamma > 2$. In this work, we initiate the study of this intermittent SPDE by analyzing what one might call the "classical" or "Da Prato-Debussche" phase which corresponds here to $\gamma\in[0,\gamma_{dPD}=2\sqrt{2} -\sqrt{6})$. By exploiting the positivity of the non-linearity $e^{\gamma X}$, we can push this classical threshold further and obtain this way a weaker notion of solution when $\gamma\in[\gamma_{dPD}, \gamma_{pos}=2\sqrt{2} - 2)$. Our proof requires an analysis of the Besov regularity of natural space/time Gaussian multiplicative chaos (GMC) measures. Regularity Structures of arbitrary high degree should potentially give strong solutions all the way to the same threshold $\gamma_{pos}$ and should not push this threshold further. Of independent interest, we prove along the way (using techniques from [HS16]) a stronger convergence result for approximate GMC measures which holds in Besov spaces.