On the sharpness of Wasserstein contraction along heat flows, and a rigidity of Euclidean spaces

Abstract: We show that if a smooth metric measure space with non-negative weighted Ricci curvature admits two distinct points such that the $2$-Wasserstein distance is preserved along the associated heat flows i.e. \begin{equation} W_2(p_t(x,\cdot),p_t(y,\cdot))=d(x,y) \end{equation} for some $x,y$ and $t>0$, then the space splits off a line. In particular, Euclidean spaces are the only spaces where the above sharpness condition holds for all pairs of points. Moreover, we show for positive $K$ that, the equality for the analogous $K$-contraction estimate for Wasserstein distances cannot be attained among smooth metric measure spaces with Ricci curvature bounded below by $K$.