A geometric study of Wasserstein spaces: isometric rigidity in negative curvature

Abstract

Given a metric space X, one defines its Wasserstein space W2(X) as a set of sufficiently decaying probability measures on X endowed with a metric defined from optimal transportation. In this article, we continue the geometric study of W2(X) when X is a simply connected, nonpositively curved metric spaces by considering its isometry group. When X is Euclidean, the second named author proved that this isometry group is larger than the isometry group of X. In contrast, we prove here a rigidity result: when X is negatively curved, any isometry of W2(X) comes from an isometry of X.