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 $\inf_M\operatorname{Ric}=-\infty$.