Existence and uniqueness of the Liouville quantum gravity metric for $\gamma \in (0,2)$

We show that for each $\gamma \in (0,2)$, there is a unique metric (i.e., distance function) associated with $\gamma$-Liouville quantum gravity (LQG). More precisely, we show that for the whole-plane Gaussian free field (GFF) $h$, there is a unique random metric $D_h$ associated with the Riemannian metric tensor "$e^{\gamma h} (dx^2 + dy^2)$" on $\mathbb C$ which is characterized by a certain list of axioms: it is locally determined by $h$ and it transforms appropriately when either adding a continuous function to $h$ or applying a conformal automorphism of $\mathbb C$ (i.e., a complex affine transformation). Metrics associated with other variants of the GFF can be constructed using local absolute continuity. The $\gamma$-LQG metric can be constructed explicitly as the scaling limit of Liouville first passage percolation (LFPP), the random metric obtained by exponentiating a mollified version of the GFF. Earlier work by Ding, Dub\'edat, Dunlap, and Falconet (2019) showed that LFPP admits non-trivial subsequential limits. This paper shows that the subsequential limit is unique and satisfies our list of axioms. In the case when $\gamma = \sqrt{8/3}$, our metric coincides with the $\sqrt{8/3}$-LQG metric constructed in previous work by Miller and Sheffield, which in turn is equivalent to the Brownian map for a certain variant of the GFF. For general $\gamma \in (0,2)$, we conjecture that our metric is the Gromov-Hausdorff limit of appropriate weighted random planar map models, equipped with their graph distance. We include a substantial list of open problems.