Bakry-\'Emery calculus for entropic curvature, new diameter estimates, and spectral gaps

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a generalization of Bakry-\'Emery's calculus which allows us to formulate both Bakry-\'Emery and entropic curvature simultaneously. This formulation represents both curvatures as an integral of the Bochner formula against some measure. This leads to a natural optimality criterion of measures, which we investigate in the Bakry-\'Emery setting. Moreover, our approach leads also to a dimension parameter in the framework of entropic curvature. We also present gradient estimate applications, that is, diameter estimates for Markov chains with strictly positive entropic curvature and a spectral gap estimate. The latter implies non-existence of non-negatively curved expanders.