Contracting Transport Maps on Riemannian Manifolds

Abstract

We use inverse mean curvature flow to construct bi-Lipschitz maps that preserve normalized volume and decrease distances. These maps send a round sphere onto any smooth closed strictly convex hypersurface in a sphere and a flat disk onto any smooth strictly convex free-boundary disk in a Euclidean ball. In dimension two, this proves a conjecture of E. Milman for every smooth two-sphere with Gaussian curvature at least one and gives an analogous result for nonnegatively curved disks whose boundary has geodesic curvature one. The spherical result proves the two-dimensional case of the spectral comparison conjectured by Colding and Minicozzi. Counterexamples in dimensions $n\ge 3$ show that the restriction to dimension two is sharp. Furthermore, an equivariant extension of this construction yields, for every $n\ge 2$, a contracting transport map from the uniform probability measure on a round hemisphere to the uniform probability measure on any closed geodesically convex subset of positive volume. This settles the remaining uniform-target case of a question raised by Beck and Jerison. In dimension two, we also find geometric conditions under which the uniform measure on the hemisphere can be transported by a contracting map to a broad class of nonuniform probability measures supported on domains in a hemisphere.

This new version includes some new results from arXiv:2605.24705v2