Calculus of Variations and Geometric Measure Theory

A. Akdemir - F. Cavalletti - A. Colinet - R. J. McCann - F. Santarcangelo

Independence of synthetic Curvature Dimension conditions on transport distance exponent

created by santarcangelo on 21 Jul 2020
modified by cavallett on 24 Feb 2021

[BibTeX]

Accepted Paper

Inserted: 21 jul 2020
Last Updated: 24 feb 2021

Journal: Trans. Amer. Math. Soc.
Year: 2020

Abstract:

The celebrated Lott-Sturm-Villani theory of metric measure spaces furnishes synthetic notions of a Ricci curvature lower bound $K$ joint with an upper bound $N$ on the dimension. Their condition, called the Curvature-Dimension condition and denoted by $\mathrm{CD}(K,N)$, is formulated in terms of a modified displacement convexity of an entropy functional along $W_{2}$-Wasserstein geodesics. We show that the choice of the squared-distance function as transport cost does not influence the theory. By denoting with $\mathrm{CD}_{p}(K,N)$ the analogous condition but with the cost as the $p^{th}$ power of the distance, we show that $\mathrm{CD}_{p}(K,N)$ are all equivalent conditions for any $p>1$ --- at least in spaces whose geodesics do not branch.

We show that the trait d'union between all the seemingly unrelated $\mathrm{CD}_{p}(K,N)$ conditions is the needle decomposition or localization technique associated to the $L^{1}$-optimal transport problem. We also establish the local-to-global property of $\mathrm{CD}_{p}(K,N)$ spaces.


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