Baby universes revisited

The behavior of baby universes has been an important ingredient in understanding and quantifying non-critical string theory or, equivalently, models of two-dimensional Euclidean quantum gravity coupled to matter. Within a regularized description based on dynamical triangulations, we amend an earlier conjecture by Jain and Mathur on the scaling behavior of genus-g surfaces containing particular baby universe 'necks', and perform a non-trivial numerical check on our improved conjecture. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.