Stability of optimal transport on sub-Riemannian manifolds

Abstract

We study the stability of optimal transport for the squared Carnot--Carath\'eodory distance. We prove the sharp $W_1^{1/4}$ stability estimate for optimal transport maps on complete Riemannian and fat sub-Riemannian manifolds, assuming bounded source support and an upper density bound. On John domains with two-sided density bounds, we obtain logarithmic $L^2$ stability of Kantorovich potentials on complete smooth sub-Riemannian manifolds that are equiregular near the source, with arbitrary compact targets. For potentials, we obtain every H\"older exponent $0<\alpha<1/2$ on two-generating structures, and the exponent $1/2$ in the Riemannian and fat settings and on all step-two Carnot groups. Three-atom examples show that the map and potential exponents with respect to $W_1$ cannot exceed $1/4$ and $1/2$, respectively, on any smooth sub-Riemannian manifold of horizontal rank at least two. We also construct smooth transport families whose target variation of order $t$ in $W_1$ produces map variation of order $t^{1/s}$ in an equiregular region of step $s$. The map estimates follow from coercivity of the duality defect, while the potential estimates follow from quantitative concavity of the Kantorovich functional.