Optimal transport from Lebesgue to Poisson

Martin Huesmann, Karl-Theodor Sturm

Published 2010-12-17, updated 2013-08-13Version 2

This paper is devoted to the study of couplings of the Lebesgue measure and the Poisson point process. We prove existence and uniqueness of an optimal coupling whenever the asymptotic mean transportation cost is finite. Moreover, we give precise conditions for the latter which demonstrate a sharp threshold at d=2. The cost will be defined in terms of an arbitrary increasing function of the distance. The coupling will be realized by means of a transport map ("allocation map") which assigns to each Poisson point a set ("cell") of Lebesgue measure 1. In the case of quadratic costs, all these cells will be convex polytopes.