On relations between transportation cost spaces and \(\ell_1\) (Q2207636)

The authors make significant progress regarding the structural behavior of transportation cost spaces (a.k.a. free spaces, Arens-Eells spaces, $\dots$) of general metric spaces. \textit{M. Cúth} and \textit{M. Johanis} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 145, No. 8, 3409--3421 (2017; Zbl 1388.46012)] asked whether every transportation cost space over an infinite uniformly discrete metric space contains an isometric copy of \(\ell_1\), and they provided six examples of uniformly discrete spaces for which the answer was unknown. \textit{S. Ostrovska} and \textit{M. I. Ostrovskii} [Mediterr. J. Math. 16, No. 6, Paper No. 157, 26 p. (2019; Zbl 1454.46014)] resolved negatively Cúth and Johanis's question by considering uniformly discrete metric spaces that are generalizations of the second example of Cúth and Johanis. The main result of this paper is an elegant characterization of metric spaces whose transportation cost spaces contain an isometric copy of \(\ell_1\). The authors then show that a nice, and almost immediate, application of their characterization is that the transportation spaces over the remaining five examples of Cúth and Johanis do not contain isometric copies of \(\ell_1\), thereby providing more counterexamples to the Cúth-Johanis question. Consider a metric space \((M,d)\) as a complete weighted graph, where the weight of each edge is defined as the distance between its ends. Let \(V\) be a subset of \(M\) of cardinality \(2n\), with \(n\in \mathbb{N}\). If edges \( \{x_i,y_i\}\), \(1\le i \le n\), with \(x_i, y_i \in V\), \(x_i \neq y_i\), do not have common ends, the collection of edges \( \{\{x_i,y_i\} : 1\le i \le n\}\) is called a perfect matching of the subgraph of \(M\) spanned by \(V\). The weight of the perfect matching is given by \(\sum_{i=1}^nd(x_i,y_i)\). The main result is the following. {Theorem.} The transportation cost space over an infinite metric space \((M,d)\) contains an isometric copy of \(\ell_1\) if and only if there exists a sequence of pairs \(\{x_i,y_i\}_{i=1}^\infty\) in \(M\), with all elements distinct, such that each collection of edges \( \{\{x_i,y_i\} : 1\le i \le n\}\) is a minimum weight perfect matching in the subgraph spanned by \( \{x_i,y_i : 1\le i \le n\}\). The sufficiency of the matching condition follows from a previous argument of \textit{S. S. Khan} et al. [Adv. Anal. Geom. 2, 189--204 (2020; Zbl 1476.46012)]. In order to prove the necessity of the matching condition, the authors distinguish three cases: \begin{enumerate} \item \(M\) has an accumulation point. \item \(M\) does not have an accumulation point and is not uniformly discrete. \item \(M\) is uniformly discrete. \end{enumerate} Case \((3)\) is the most delicate. The paper also contains a generalization to weighted finite graphs, of the description of the transportation cost space in terms of the quotient of the \(\ell_1\)-space over the edges of the graph by the cycle space of the graph.