The Brownian loop-catcher

We introduce a family of random connected closed subsets of planar Brownian motion, called Brownian loop-catchers, which interpolate between the continuum loop-erased random-walk (LERW) and the Brownian trace. This provides the canonical continuation of Brownian loop soup clusters to central charges $-2\le c<0$. For each such $c$, the corresponding loop-catcher satisfies the following recovery property: adding all loops from an independent Brownian loop soup of intensity $-c/2$ that intersect it recovers the Brownian trace. Furthermore, no such law exists for $c<-2$. We also show that its outer boundary is locally SLE$_\kappa$ with $\kappa = \frac{1}{3}\left(13 - c - \sqrt{(1-c)(25-c)}\right)\in[2,\frac83)$, and the probability that it intersects an interior ball of radius $\varepsilon$ is asymptotically proportional to $|\log\varepsilon|^{-1+\frac{c}{2}}$ when $-2<c<0$. Therefore, a planar Brownian trace contains an SLE$_\kappa$-type curve for every $\kappa\in[2,\frac83]$.
Our construction begins with a random-walk loop-catcher on any finite graph, whose law is determined by a finite linear system. We prove that its solution is nonnegative for $-2\leq c<0$, while nonnegativity can fail for $c<-2$. The key ingredient is a new entangled multipath LERW, which recovers a union of independent random-walk paths when decorated with a single common random-walk loop soup. We then prove that the random-walk loop-catcher converges to the Brownian loop-catcher under lattice approximations. To this end, we propose a novel Green function test which converts the recovery property of the Brownian loop-catcher into all mixed moments of Green functions in the remaining domain, based on the entangled multipath LERW. Consequently, the recovery property characterizes the full law of the Brownian loop-catcher, not only its filling. The Green function test also extends to the three-dimensional case.