Transport maps, non-branching sets of geodesics and measure rigidity

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the relationship between a general existence of transport maps of optimal couplings with absolutely continuous first marginal and the property of the background measure called essentially non-branching introduced by Rajala–Sturm (2014) [27]. In particular, it is shown that the qualitative non-degeneracy condition introduced by Cavalletti–Huesmann (2015) [6] implies that any essentially non-branching metric measure space has a unique transport maps whenever the initial measure is absolutely continuous. This generalizes a recently obtained result by Cavalletti–Mondino (2017) [8] on essentially non-branching spaces with the measure contraction condition MCP(K,N).In the end we prove a measure rigidity result showing that any two essentially non-branching, qualitatively non-degenerate measures on a fixed metric spaces must be mutually absolutely continuous. This result was obtained under stronger conditions by Cavalletti–Mondino (2016) [7]. It applies, in particular, to metric measure spaces with generalized finite dimensional Ricci curvature bounded from below.