Paper detail

Regularity of optimal transport maps on multiple products of spheres

This article addresses regularity of optimal transport maps for cost="squared distance" on Riemannian manifolds that are products of arbitrarily many round spheres with arbitrary sizes and dimensions. Such manifolds are known to be non-negatively cross-curved [KM2]. Under boundedness and non-vanishing assumptions on the transfered source and target densities we show that optimal maps stay away from the cut-locus (where the cost exhibits singularity), and obtain injectivity and continuity of optimal maps. This together with the result of Liu, Trudinger and Wang [LTW] also implies higher regularity (C^{1,α}/C^\infty) of optimal maps for more smooth (C^α/C^\infty)) densities. These are the first global regularity results which we are aware of concerning optimal maps on non-flat Riemannian manifolds which possess some vanishing sectional curvatures. Moreover, such product manifolds have potential relevance in statistics (see [S]) and in statistical mechanics (where the state of a system consisting of many spins is classically modeled by a point in the phase space obtained by taking many products of spheres). For the proof we apply and extend the method developed in [FKM1], where we showed injectivity and continuity of optimal maps on domains in R^n for smooth non-negatively cross-curved cost. The major obstacle in the present paper is to deal with the non-trivial cut-locus and the presence of flat directions.