A unicellular map is a map which has only one face. We give a bijection
between a dominant subset of rooted unicellular maps of fixed genus and a set
of rooted plane trees with distinguished vertices. The bijection applies as
well to the case of labelled unicellular maps, which are related to all rooted
maps by Marcus and Schaeffer's bijection.
This gives an immediate derivation of the asymptotic number of unicellular
maps of given genus, and a simple bijective proof of a formula of Lehman and
Walsh on the number of triangulations with one vertex. From the labelled case,
we deduce an expression of the asymptotic number of maps of genus g with n
edges involving the ISE random measure, and an explicit characterization of the
limiting profile and radius of random bipartite quadrangulations of genus g in
terms of the ISE.Comment: 27pages, 6 figures, to appear in PTRF. Version 2 includes corrections
from referee report in sections 6-