Optimal transport in Lorentzian synthetic spaces, synthetic timelike Ricci curvature lower bounds and applications (Q6639655)

This work considers Lorentzian metric spaces of low regularity. Such a necessity is clear from the PDE point of view in general relativity (i.e., the Cauchy initial value problem for the Einstein equations): indeed the standard local existence results for the vacuum Einstein equations assume the metric to be of Sobolev regularity. The goals of the present work is to address the question of (time-like Ricci) curvature when not only the metric tensor, but the spacetime itself is singular.\N\NThe authors work in the framework of measured Lorentzian pre-length spaces and give a synthetic notion of ``time-like Ricci curvature bounded below and dimension bounded above'' using optimal transport by analysing the convexity properties of entropy functionals along future directed timelike geodesics of probability measures. As applications, the authors extend to this setting the volume comparisons and Hawking singularity theorem.