The purpose of this article is threefold. First, we show that
when one explores a conformal loop ensemble of parameter
() on an independent
-Liouville quantum
gravity (-LQG)
disk, the surfaces which are cut out are independent quantum disks.
To achieve this, we rely on approximations of the explorations of a
: we first approximate
the
explorations
for
using
explorations of the
as
and then we approximate the uniform exploration by letting
. Second,
we describe the relation between the so-called natural quantum distance and the
conformally invariant distance to the boundary introduced by Werner and Wu (2013).
Third, we establish the scaling limit of the distances from the boundary to the large faces of
-stable maps and relate the
limit to the
-decorated
-LQG.