2D Dilaton Gravity and the Weil–Petersson Volumes with Conical Defects

Abstract

We derive the Weil–Petersson measure on the moduli space of hyperbolic surfaces with defects of arbitrary opening angles and use this to compute its volume. We conjecture a matrix integral computing the corresponding volumes and confirm agreement in simple cases. We combine this mathematical result with the equivariant localization approach to Jackiw–Teitelboim gravity to justify a proposed exact solution of pure 2d dilaton gravity for a large class of dilaton potentials.