We give a new construction of the Brownian annulus based on removing a hull centered at the distinguished point in the free Brownian disk. We use this construction to prove that the Brownian annulus is the scaling limit of Boltzmann triangulations with two boundaries. We also prove that the space obtained by removing hulls centered at the two distinguished points of the Brownian sphere is a Brownian annulus. Our proofs rely on a detailed analysis of the peeling by layers algorithm for Boltzmann triangulations with a boundary.

We show that local times of super-Brownian motion, or of Brownian motion indexed by the Brownian tree, satisfy an explicit stochastic differential equation. Our proofs rely on both excursion theory for the Brownian snake and tools from the theory of superprocesses.

We derive a new representation of the Brownian disk in terms of a forest of labeled trees, where labels correspond to distances from a subset of the boundary. We then use this representation to obtain a spatial Markov property showing that the complement of a hull centered at a boundary point of a Brownian disk is again a Brownian disk, with a random perimeter, and is independent of the hull conditionally on its perimeter. Our proofs rely in part on a study of the peeling process for triangulations with a boundary, which is of independent interest. The results of the present work will be applied to a continuous version of the peeling process for the Brownian half-plane in a companion paper.

We establish a new spatial Markov property of the Brownian half-plane. According to this property, if one removes a hull centered at a boundary point, the remaining space equipped with an intrinsic metric is still a Brownian half-plane, which is independent of the part that has been removed. This is an analog of the well-known peeling procedure for random planar maps. We also investigate several distributional properties of hulls centered at a boundary point, and we provide a new construction of the Brownian half-plane giving information about distances from a half-boundary.

We consider the model of Brownian motion indexed by the Brownian tree, which has appeared in a variety of different contexts in probability, statistical physics and combinatorics. For this model, the total occupation measure is known to have a continuously differentiable density. Although the density process indexed by nonnegative reals is not Markov, we prove that the pair consisting of the density and its derivative is a time-homogeneous Markov process. We also establish a similar result for the local times of one-dimensional super-Brownian motion. Our methods rely on the excursion theory for Brownian motion indexed by the Brownian tree.

We provide a new construction of Brownian disks in terms of forests of continuous random trees equipped with nonnegative labels corresponding to distances from a distinguished point uniformly distributed on the boundary of the disk. This construction shows in particular that distances from the distinguished point evolve along the boundary as a five-dimensional Bessel bridge. As an important ingredient of our proofs, we show that the uniform measure on the boundary, as defined in the earlier work of Bettinelli and Miermont, is the limit of the suitably normalized volume measure on a small tubular neighborhood of the boundary. Our construction also yields a simple proof of the equivalence between the two definitions of the Brownian half-plane.

A point of a metric space is called a geodesic star with $m$ arms if it is the endpoint of $m$ disjoint geodesics. For every $m\in\{1,2,3,4\}$, we prove that the set of all geodesic stars with $m$ arms in the Brownian sphere has dimension $5-m$. This complements recent results of Miller and Qian, who proved that this dimension is smaller than or equal to $5-m$.

Jean-François Le Gall's graduate textbook provides a rigorous treatement of measure theory, probability, and stochastic processes.