Werner's measure on self-avoiding loops and welding

Werner's conformally invariant family of measures on self-avoiding loops on Riemann surfaces is determined by a single measure μ₀ on self-avoiding loops in ℂ\{0} which surround 0. Our first major objective is to show that the measure μ₀ is infinitesimally invariant with respect to conformal vector fields (essentially the Virasoro algebra of conformal field theory). This makes essential use of classical variational formulas of Duren and Schiffer, which we recast in representation theoretic terms for efficient computation. We secondly show how these formulas can be used to calculate (in principle, and sometimes explicitly) quantities (such as moments for coefficients of univalent functions) associated to the conformal welding for a self-avoiding loop. This gives an alternate proof of the uniqueness of Werner's measure. We also attempt to use these variational formulas to derive a differential equation for the (Laplace transform of) the "diagonal distribution" for the conformal welding associated to a loop; this generalizes in a suggestive way to a deformation of Werner's measure conjectured to exist by Kontsevich and Suhov (a basic inspiration for this paper).