A Wasserstein inequality and minimal Green energy on compact manifolds (Q2066029)

The author considers the classical problem of distributing points evenly over a compact domain. More specifically, if \(M\) is an smooth, compact \(d\)-dimensional manifold, \(d\geq 3\), without boundary and \(G: M\times M\rightarrow {\mathbb R} \cup \{ \infty\}\) denotes the Green's function of the Laplacian \(-\Delta\) (normalized to have mean value 0), he proves a bound on the cost of transporting Dirac measures in \(\{ x_1, ... ,x_n\} \subset M\) to the normalized volume measure \(dx\) in terms of the Green's function of the Laplacian \[W_2\left( \frac{1}{n}\sum_{k=1}^n \delta_{x_k},dx\right) \lesssim_M \frac{1}{n^{1/d}}+\frac{1}{n}\left\vert\sum_{k\neq l}G(x_k,x_l)\right\vert^{1/2}.\] If the manifold is two-dimensional, \(d=2\), then it is obtained \[W_2\left( \frac{1}{n}\sum_{k=1}^n \delta_{x_k},dx\right) \lesssim_M \frac{\sqrt{\log n}}{n^{1/2}}+\frac{1}{n}\left\vert\sum_{k\neq l}G(x_k,x_l)\right\vert^{1/2}\] The result is sharp for \(d\geq 3\) and sharp up to possibly the factor of \(\sqrt{\log n}\) for \(d=2\). This result should have an analogue for the Coulomb energy \(1/\vert x\vert^{d-2}\) which has Fourier decay \(1/\vert\xi\vert^2\) corresponding to the space \(H^{-1}\) (which in turn is connected to the Wasserstein distance). The author makes this precise for the sphere \({\mathbb S}^d\), proving that if \(d\geq 3\) and \(\{ x_1, ... ,x_n\} \subset {\mathbb S}^d\), then \[W_2\left( \frac{1}{n}\sum_{k=1}^n \delta_{x_k},dx\right) \lesssim_M \frac{1}{n^{1/d}}+\left\vert \frac{1}{n^2}\sum_{k\neq l}\left( \frac{1}{\Vert x_k-x_l\Vert^{d-2}}-c_d\right) \right\vert^{1/2},\] \noindent where \[c_d=\frac{1}{\vert {\mathbb S}^d \vert^2}\int_{ {\mathbb S}^d \times {\mathbb S}^d}\frac{dx\, dy}{\Vert x-y\Vert^{d-2}}\] \noindent is the constant that normalizes the Coulomb energy to mean \(0\). The author also finds some applications of these results in number theory: diaphony.