continuity, curvature, and the general covariance of optimal.pdf

CONTINUITY, CURVATURE, AND THE GENERAL COVARIANCE OF OPTIMAL TRANSPORTATION YOUNG-HEON KIM AND ROBERT J. MCCANN ¯ Abstract. Let M and M be n-dimensional manifolds equipped with suit- n ¯ able Borel probability measures ρ and ρ¯. For subdomains M and M of R , Ma, Trudinger Wang gave sufficient conditions on a transportation cost 4 ¯ c ∈ C (M × M ) to guarantee smoothness of the optimal map pushing ρ for- ward to ρ¯; the necessity of these conditions was deduced by Loeper. The present manuscript shows the form of these conditions to be largely dictated by the covariance of the question; it expresses them via non-negativity of the sectional curvature of certain null-planes in a novel but natural pseudo- ¯ Riemannian geometry which the cost c induces on the product space M × M . We also explore some connections between optimal transportation and space- like Lagrangian submanifolds in symplectic geometry. Using the pseudo-Riemannian structure, we extend Ma, Trudinger and Wang’s conditions to transportation costs on differentiable manifolds, and pro- vide a direct elementary proof of a maximum principal characterizing it due to n