Locality property of SLE

The locality property says that an SLE does not detect a hull lying away from its starting point until the curve reaches that hull. Among chordal Schramm-Loewner evolutions, this property holds for ${\mathrm{SLE}}_6$.

A scale-invariant law of unparameterized chords from zero to infinity in the complex upper half-plane is local when a boundary-preserving conformal map between neighborhoods of zero, fixing zero, transports its curve stopped on leaving the first neighborhood to the same-law curve stopped on leaving the second. Equality concerns the stopped curves up to increasing reparameterization. For SLE with parameter six, the transformed SLE driving function is a continuous local martingale with bracket six times the image capacity clock. The Lévy characterization of Brownian motion makes that driver Brownian in the new clock, proving the local stopped-curve invariance.

Changing the target boundary point by a conformal automorphism of the upper half-plane preserves the local chordal SLE law at parameter six, up to a capacity time change and until the relevant boundary point is swallowed. The transformed SLE driving function has zero drift at six; the Dambis-Dubins-Schwarz theorem makes it Brownian in image capacity time.

At parameter six, changing a boundary target preserves the initial unparameterized SLE law until the growing hull separates the two possible targets. After separation, each curve continues in the complementary component whose boundary contains its own target. A curve targeted at infinity follows the unbounded component, whereas a finite separated target lies on a different component. The target-change locality of SLE6 proof no longer applies: its conformal automorphism of the upper half-plane conjugates corresponding surviving domains only before this separation. A zero drift before contact does not give equality of complete curve laws afterwards.