English

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 C2C^2. 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 C1C^1 and that the converse holds for C1,1C^{1,1}-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