Hyperuniformity and optimal transport of point processes

Raphaël Lachièze-Rey, D. Yogeshwaran

Published 2024-02-21, updated 2024-03-05Version 2

We examine optimal matchings or transport between two stationary point processes and in particular, from a point process to the (integer) lattice or the Lebesgue measure respectively. The main focus of the article is the implication of hyperuniformity (reduced variance fluctuations in point processes) to optimal transport: in dimension $2$, we show that the typical matching cost has finite second moment under a mild logarithmic integrability condition on the reduced pair correlation measure, showing that most planar hyperuniform point processes are $ L^2$-perturbed lattices. Our method does not formally require assumptions on the correlation measure or the variance behaviour and it retrieves known sharp bounds for neutral integrable systems such as Poisson processes, and also applies to hyperfluctuating systems. The proof relies on the estimation of the optimal transport cost between point processes restricted to large windows for a well-chosen cost through their Fourier-Stieljes transforms, related to their structure factor. The existence of an infinite matching is obtained through a compactness argument on the space of random measures.