Geometric Interpretation of Half-Plane Capacity

Abstract Schramm-Loewner Evolution describes the scaling limits of interfaces in certain statistical mechanical systems. These interfaces are geometric objects that are not equipped with a canonical parametrization. The standard parametrization of SLE is via half-plane capacity, which is a conformal measure of the size of a set in the reference upper half-plane. This has useful harmonic and complex analytic properties and makes SLE a time-homogeneous Markov process on conformal maps. In this note, we show that the half-plane capacity of a hull A is comparable up to multiplicative constants to more geometric quantities, namely the area of the union of all balls centered in A tangent to R, and the (Euclidean) area of a 1-neighborhood of A with respect to the hyperbolic metric.