Propagation of Chaos on Riemannian Manifolds

Abstract

We extend reflection coupling for uniform-in-time propagation of chaos from Euclidean space to complete Riemannian manifolds. Intrinsic reflection along minimizing geodesics replaces the Euclidean difference process, and the associated endpoint-index term quantifies the competition between curvature, confinement, and interaction. Under an endpoint-index bound and a radial Laplacian bound, we establish global well-posedness, uniform moment estimates, and uniform-in-time propagation of chaos with rate $N^{-1/2}$ in a modified Wasserstein distance. We further obtain exponential contraction of the nonlinear McKean--Vlasov semigroup, uniqueness of its invariant probability measure among probability measures with finite second moment, and exponential convergence to equilibrium. Although a Ricci lower bound is an important special case, our framework also includes a curvature-spike class with $\inf_M\operatorname{Ric}=-\infty$.