Stability of Kantorovich potentials via heat kernel regularization

Abstract

This survey presents heat kernel regularization as a method for quantitative stability of Kantorovich potentials for the quadratic transport cost. We give a complete new heat kernel proof on Heisenberg groups equipped with the Carnot--Carathéodory distance. For source densities bounded above and away from zero on bounded John domains, we obtain $L^2$ stability with rate $W_1^{1/2}$ for arbitrary targets in a fixed compact set, including atomic measures. We also establish a new $L^2$ stability estimate on finite-dimensional RCD spaces, with the optimal dimension-independent exponent $1/2$.

arXiv commentThis is a survey paper submitted to the proceedings volume of the conference "18th MSJ-SI: Analysis, Geometry and Probability on Metric Measure Spaces - Fukuoka 2026"