Synthetic versus distributional lower Ricci curvature bounds
Differential Geometry
2026-01-14 v3 Metric Geometry
Abstract
We compare two standard approaches to defining lower Ricci curvature bounds for Riemannian metrics of regularity below . These are, on the one hand, the synthetic definition via weak displacement convexity of entropy functionals in the framework of optimal transport, and the distributional one based on non-negativity of the Ricci-tensor in the sense of Schwartz. It turns out that distributional bounds imply entropy bounds for metrics of class and that the converse holds for -metrics under an additional convergence condition on regularisations of the metric.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2207.03715,
title = {Synthetic versus distributional lower Ricci curvature bounds},
author = {Michael Kunzinger and Michael Oberguggenberger and James A. Vickers},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.03715},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
23 pages, small correction in the proof of Th. 4.3