An enhanced uncertainty principle for the Vaserstein distance

Abstract

We improve some recent results of Sagiv and Steinerberger that quantify the following uncertainty principle: for a function $f$ with mean zero, either the size of the zero set of the function or the cost of transporting the mass of the positive part of $f$ to its negative part must be big. We also provide a sharp upper estimate of the transport cost of the positive part of an eigenfunction of the Laplacian. This proves a conjecture of Steinerberger and provides a lower bound of the size of the nodal set of the eigenfunction.