Transport inequalities, gradient estimates, entropy and Ricci curvature

Source abstract

Abstract We present various characterizations of uniform lower bounds for the Ricci curvature of a smooth Riemannian manifold M in terms of convexity properties of the entropy (considered as a function on the space of probability measures on M ) as well as in terms of transportation inequalities for volume measures, heat kernels, and Brownian motions and in terms of gradient estimates for the heat semigroup. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.