Heat Flow with Dirichlet Boundary Conditions via Optimal Transport and Gluing of Metric Measure Spaces

Abstract

We introduce the transportation-annihilation distance $W_p^\sharp$ between subprobabilities and derive contraction estimates with respect to this distance for the heat flow with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions on an open set in a metric measure space. We also deduce the Bochner inequality for the Dirichlet Laplacian as well as gradient estimates for the associated Dirichlet heat flow. For the Dirichlet heat flow, moreover, we establish a gradient flow interpretation within a suitable space of charged probabilities. In order to prove this, we will work with the \emph{doubling} of the open set, the space obtained by gluing together two copies of it along the boundary.