On bounded-type thin local sets of the two-dimensional Gaussian free field

We study certain classes of local sets of the two-dimensional Gaussian free field (GFF) in a simply-connected domain, and their relation to the conformal loop ensemble CLE(4) and its variants. More specifically, we consider bounded-type thin local sets (BTLS), where thin means that the local set is small in size, and bounded-type means that the harmonic function describing the mean value of the field away from the local set is bounded by some deterministic constant. We show that a local set is a BTLS if and only if it is contained in some nested version of the CLE(4) carpet, and prove that all BTLS are necessarily connected to the boundary of the domain. We also construct all possible BTLS for which the corresponding harmonic function takes only two prescribed values and show that all these sets (and this includes the case of CLE(4)) are in fact measurable functions of the GFF.