Remarks on curvature in the transportation metric

Abstract

According to a classical result of E. Calabi any hyperbolic affine hypersphere endowed with its natural Hessian metric has a non-positive Ricci tensor. The affine hyperspheres can be described as the level sets of solutions to the “hyperbolic” toric Kahler–Einstein equation e Φ = detD 2Φ on proper convex cones. We prove a generalization of this theorem by showing that for every Φ solving this equation on a proper convex domain Ω the corresponding metric measure space (D 2Φ, e Φ dx) has a non-positive Bakry–Emery tensor. Modifying the Calabi computations we obtain this result by applying the tensorial maximum principle to the weighted Laplacian of the Bakry–Emery tensor. Our computations are carried out in a generalized framework adapted to the optimal transportation problem for arbitrary target and source measures. For the optimal transportation of the log-concave probability measures we prove a third-order uniform dimension-free apriori estimate in the spirit of the second-order Caffarelli contraction theorem, which has numerous applications in probability theory.