Discreteness of the minimizers of weakly repulsive interaction energies on Riemannian manifolds

Abstract

It is shown that the supports of measures minimizing weakly repulsive energies on Riemannian manifolds with sectional curvature bounded below do not have concentration points. This extends the results of Bj\"orck and Carrillo, Figalli, and Patacchini for such energies on the Euclidean space, and complements the results about the discreteness of minimizers of the geodesic Riesz energy on the sphere by Bilyk, Dai, and Matzke.