Sharp Continuity Moduli for Dirichlet Heat Flow in Boundary-Reservoir Transport Metrics

Let $\Omega\subset\mathbb R^n$ be a bounded $C^2$ open set and let $P_t$ be the killed Dirichlet heat semigroup.

We prove the sharp fixed-time power-scale modulus of $P_t$ for the Figalli--Gigli boundary-reservoir transport distances $W_{b,p}$.

For every $t>0$, $P_t$ is globally Lipschitz with respect to $W_{b,1}$.

For every $p>1$, and on every total-mass sublevel $\{\mu:\mu(\Omega)\le m\}$, it is $1/p$-Hölder: \[ W_{b,p}(P_t\mu,P_t\nu)^p \le C_{t,p,m,\Omega} W_{b,p}(\mu,\nu). \] For $p>1$, we show that the exponent $1/p$ is optimal in the scale of power moduli.

On the full finite-measure space, $P_t$ is discontinuous at the zero measure.

To establish the lower bound, we rely on the amplification of the boundary layer.

More precisely, a unit mass initially placed at distance $\varepsilon$ from $\partial\Omega$ has input $W_{b,p}$-distance $O(\varepsilon)$ from zero, whereas after any fixed positive time, its $p$-th boundary moment is bounded below by $c\varepsilon$.

As a result, in the quadratic case and in the original finite-measure $W_{b,2}$ metric, there does not exist a standard finite-$\lambda$ $\mathrm{EVI}_\lambda$ semigroup on a $W_{b,2}$-metric domain which would contain the affine constant-boundary data class and could restrict to the affine constant-boundary Dirichlet heat flow.

Finally, we also describe the corresponding lower-bound obstruction for smooth uniformly elliptic perturbations in divergence form.