Cone structure of $L^2$-Wasserstein spaces

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to understand the geometric structure of the $L^2$-Wasserstein space $\pp$ over the Euclidean space.For this sake, we focus on its cone structure.One of our main results is that the $L^2$-Wasserstein space over a Polish space has a cone structure if and only if so does the underlying space.In particular, $\pp$ turns out to have a cone structure.It is also shown that $\pp$ splits $\R^d$ isometrically but not $\R^{d+1}$.