The purpose of the present work is twofold. First, we develop the theory of general self-similar growth-fragmentation processes by focusing on martingales which appear naturally in this setting and by recasting classical results for branching random walks in this framework. In particular, we establish many-to-one formulas for growth-fragmentations and define the notion of intrinsic area of a growth-fragmentation. Second, we identify a distinguished family of growth-fragmentations closely related to stable Lévy processes, which are then shown to arise as the scaling limit of the perimeter process in Markovian explorations of certain random planar maps with large degrees (which are, roughly speaking, the dual maps of the stable maps of Le Gall & Miermont [36]). As a consequence of this result, we are able to identify the law of the intrinsic area of these distinguished growthfragmentations. This generalizes a geometric connection between large Boltzmann triangulations and a certain growth-fragmentation process, which was established in [8].

We introduce a class of random compact metric spaces L(\alpha) indexed by \alpha \in (1,2) and which we call stable looptrees. They are made of a collection of random loops glued together along a tree structure, and can be informally be viewed as dual graphs of \alpha-stable L\'evy trees. We study their properties and prove in particular that the Hausdorff dimension of L(\alpha) is almost surely equal to \alpha. We also show that stable looptrees are universal scaling limits, for the Gromov-Hausdorff topology, of various combinatorial models. In a companion paper, we prove that the stable looptree of parameter 3/2 is the scaling limit of cluster boundaries in critical site-percolation on large random triangulations.Comment: 35 pages, 12 figures. Final version, Electron. J. Probab. 19 (2014), no. 108, 1-3

We are interested in the cycles obtained by slicing at all heights random Boltzmann triangulations with a simple boundary. We establish a functional invariance principle for the lengths of these cycles, appropriately rescaled, as the size of the boundary grows. The limiting process is described using a self-similar growth-fragmentation process with explicit parameters. To this end, we introduce a branching peeling exploration of Boltzmann triangulations, which allows us to identify a crucial martingale involving the perimeters of cycles at given heights. We also use a recent result concerning self-similar scaling limits of Markov chains on the nonnegative integers. A motivation for this work is to give a new construction of the Brownian map from a growth-fragmentation process.