Optimal transportation, topology and uniqueness

The Monge-Kantorovich transportation problem involves optimizing with respect to a given a cost function. Uniqueness is a fundamental open question about which little is known when the cost function is smooth and the landscapes containing the goods to be transported possess (non-trivial) topology. This question turns out to be closely linked to a delicate problem (# 111) of Birkhoff [14]: give a necessary and sufficient condition on the support of a joint probability to guarantee extremality among all measures which share its marginals. Fifty years of progress on Birkhoff's question culminate in Hestir and Williams' necessary condition which is nearly sufficient for extremality; we relax their subtle measurability hypotheses separating necessity from sufficiency slightly, yet demonstrate by example that to be sufficient certainly requires some measurability. Their condition amounts to the vanishing of the measure \gamma outside a countable alternating sequence of graphs and antigraphs in which no two graphs (or two antigraphs) have domains that overlap, and where the domain of each graph / antigraph in the sequence contains the range of the succeeding antigraph (respectively, graph). Such sequences are called numbered limb systems. We then explain how this characterization can be used to resolve the uniqueness of Kantorovich solutions for optimal transportation on a manifold with the topology of the sphere.Comment: 36 pages, 6 figure

Well-posedness of strong solutions for the Vlasov equation coupled to non-Newtonian fluids in dimension three

We consider the Cauchy problem for coupled system of Vlasov and non-Newtonian fluid equations. We establish local well--posedness of the strong solutions, provided that the initial data are regular enough. Global existence of unique strong solutions for any given time interval is shown as well if the initial data are sufficiently small.Comment: 29 page

Bounded weak solutions for Keller-Segel equations with generalized diffusion and logistic source via an unbalanced Optimal Transport splitting scheme

We consider a parabolic-elliptic type of Keller-Segel equations with generalized diffusion and logistic source under homogeneous Neumann-Neumann boundary conditions. We construct bounded weak solutions globally in time in an unbalanced optimal transport framework, provided that the magnitude of the chemotactic sensitivity can be restricted depending on parameters. In the case of subquadratic degradation of the logistic source, we quantify the chemotactic sensitivity, in particular, in terms of the power of degradation and the pointwise bound of the initial density.Comment: 30 page

Differential forms on Wasserstein space and infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian systems

Let M denote the space of probability measures on R^D endowed with the Wasserstein metric. A differential calculus for a certain class of absolutely continuous curves in M was introduced by Ambrosio, Gigli and Savare'. In this paper we develop a calculus for the corresponding class of differential forms on M. In particular we prove an analogue of Green's theorem for 1-forms and show that the corresponding first cohomology group, in the sense of de Rham, vanishes. For D=2d we then define a symplectic distribution on M in terms of this calculus, thus obtaining a rigorous framework for the notion of Hamiltonian systems as introduced by Ambrosio and Gangbo. Throughout the paper we emphasize the geometric viewpoint and the role played by certain diffeomorphism groups of R^D.Comment: Version 2. Improved presentation, slight technical changes. To appear in Memoirs AM

Generating and Adding Flows on Locally Complete Metric Spaces

As a generalization of a vector field on a manifold, the notion of an arc field on a locally complete metric space was introduced in \cite{BC}. In that paper, the authors proved an analogue of the Cauchy-Lipschitz Theorem i.e they showed the existence and uniqueness of solution curves for a time independent arc field. In this paper, we extend the result to the time dependent case, namely we show the existence and uniqueness of solution curves for a time dependent arc field. We also introduce the notion of the sum of two time dependent arc fields and show existence and uniqueness of solution curves for this sum.Comment: 29 pages,6 figure