On the Geometry of Wasserstein Barycenter II: Riemannian Rigidity, Essential Non-Branching, and Finsler Models

Wasserstein barycenters provide a notion of weighted mean for probability measures on a metric space. We prove that the barycenter curvature-dimension condition ${\rm BCD}(K,N)$ is equivalent to ${\rm RCD}(K,N)$ for $K\in \mathbb R$ and $1<N<\infty$. This gives a new characterization of Riemannian c