Transport Inequalities, Gradient Estimates, Entropy and Ricci.pdfVIP

Transport Inequalities, Gradient Estimates, Entropy and Ricci Curvature Karl-Theodor Sturm Max-Konstantin von Renesse University of Bonn1 Abstract. We present various characterizations of uniform lower bounds for the Ricci curvature of a smooth Riemannian manifold M in terms of convexity properties of the entropy (considered as a function on the space of probability measures on M ) as well as in terms of transportation inequalities for volume measures, heat kernels and Brownian motions and in terms of gradient estimates for the heat semigroup. Keywords. transport inequalities, coupling, Wasserstein distance, displacement convexity, gra- dient estimate, entropy, Ricci curvature, Bakry-Emery estimate. 1 Introduction and statement of the main results For metric measure spaces there is neither a notion of Ricci curvature nor a common notion of bounds for the Ricci curvature (comparable for instance to Alexandrov’s notion of bounds for the sectional curvature for metric spaces). The goal of this paper is to present various characterizations of uniform lower bounds for the Ricci curvature of a smooth Riemannian manifold M in terms of convexity properties of the entropy (considered as a function on the space of probability measures on M ) as well as in terms of transportation inequalities for volume measures, heat kernels and Brownian motions and in terms of gradient estimates for the heat semigroup. In the sequel, (M, g) always is assumed to be a smooth connected Riemannian manifold with dimension n, Riemannian distance d(x, y) and Riemannian volume m(dx) = vol(dx). For r r ∈ [1, ∞[ the L -Wasserstein distance of two measures µ , µ on M is defined as 1 2