arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Nicola Gigli.
We present a new relation between the short time behavior of the heat flow, the geometry of optimal transport and the Ricci flow. We also show how this relation can be used to define an evolution of metrics on non-smooth metric measure spaces with Ricci curvature bounded from below.
We compare several notion of weak (modulus of) gradient in metric measure spaces. Using tools from optimal transportation theory we prove density in energy of Lipschitz maps independenly of doubling and Poincaré assumptions on the metric measure space.
We provide a quick overview of various calculus tools and of the main results concerning the heat flow on compact metric measure spaces, with applications to spaces with lower Ricci curvature bounds. Topics include the Hopf-Lax semigroup and the Hamilton-Jacobi equation in metric spaces, a new approach to differentiation and to the theory of Sobolev spaces over metric measure spaces, the equivalence of the L^2-gradient flow of a suitably defined "Dirichlet energy" and the Wasserstein gradient flow of the relative entropy functional, a metric version of Brenier's Theorem, and a new (stronger) definition of Ricci curvature bound from below for metric measure spaces. This new notion is stable w.r.t. measured Gromov-Hausdorff convergence and it is strictly connected with the linearity of the heat flow.
We prove that on compact Alexandrov spaces with curvature bounded below the gradient flow of the Dirichlet energy in the $L^2$-space produces the same evolution as the gradient flow of the relative entropy in the $L^2$-Wasserstein space. This means that the heat flow is well defined by either one of the two gradient flows. Combining properties of these flows, we are able to deduce the Lipschitz continuity of the heat kernel as well as Bakry-Émery gradient estimates and the $Γ_2$-condition. Our identification is established by purely metric means, unlike preceding results relying on PDE techniques. Our approach generalizes to the case of heat flow with drift.
In this paper we introduce a synthetic notion of Riemannian Ricci bounds from below for metric measure spaces (X,d,m) which is stable under measured Gromov-Hausdorff convergence and rules out Finsler geometries. It can be given in terms of an enforcement of the Lott, Sturm and Villani geodesic convexity condition for the entropy coupled with the linearity of the heat flow. Besides stability, it enjoys the same tensorization, global-to-local and local-to-global properties. In these spaces, that we call RCD(K,\infty) spaces, we prove that the heat flow (which can be equivalently characterized either as the flow associated to the Dirichlet form, or as the Wasserstein gradient flow of the entropy) satisfies Wasserstein contraction estimates and several regularity properties, in particular Bakry-Emery estimates and the L^\infty-Lip Feller regularization. We also prove that the distance induced by the Dirichlet form coincides with d, that the local energy measure has density given by the square of Cheeger's relaxed slope and, as a consequence, that the underlying Brownian motion has continuous paths. All these results are obtained independently of Poincaré and doubling assumptions on the metric measure structure and therefore apply also to spaces which are not locally compact, as the infinite-dimensional ones