Gradient flow for the Boltzmann entropy and Cheeger's energy on time-dependent metric measure spaces

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework for dynamic gradient flows on evolving metric measure spaces, establishing existence and uniqueness results for flows driven by Boltzmann entropy and Cheeger's energy, linking them to heat flows under Ricci curvature bounds.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of dynamic gradient flows on time-dependent spaces and proves their existence and uniqueness for key energy functionals, connecting them to known heat flows.

Findings

Existence of solutions for time-dependent energy functionals.

Uniqueness of entropy gradient flows under Ricci curvature bounds.

Identification of gradient flows with known heat flows.

Abstract

We introduce notions of dynamic gradient flows on time-dependent metric spaces as well as on time-dependent Hilbert spaces. We prove existence of solutions for a class of time dependent energy functionals in both settings. In particular we are interested in the case when the underlying spaces are metric measure spaces and the energy functional is given by the time-dependent Boltzmann entropy or the time-dependent Cheeger's energy. Under the assumption that each static space satisfies a lower Ricci curvature bound, we prove existence and uniqueness of the entropy gradient flow and we identify it with the forward adjoint heat flow introduced in "Super-Ricci Flows for Metric Measure Spaces" by Kopfer/Sturm. We identify the gradient flow for the time-dependent Cheeger's energy with the heat flow introduced by Kopfer/Sturm.