Monge's transport problem in synthetic Lorentzian spacetimes

Abstract

We prove the existence of solutions to the Lorentzian Monge problem on synthetic Lorentzian spacetimes that satisfy the forward timelike measure contraction property $TMCP^+(K,N)$. The cost for this problem is the time separation function $\ell(x,y)$ (the Lorentz distance), which represents the maximum amount a particle can age when traveling from $x$ to $y$. The solution is based on the needle decomposition technique, and amounts to a reduction of the full problem to its one-dimensional counterparts. As an application of needle decomposition, we show that the Lorentzian timelike measure contraction property $TMCP^+(K,N)$ is equivalent to the $TMCP^+_{rLip}(K,N)$ condition, where the curvature dimension conditions are defined on gradient flow curves of reverse 1-Lipschitz functions.