Mass Transport and Variants of the Logarithmic Sobolev Inequality

We develop the optimal transportation approach to modified log-Sobolev inequalities and to isoperimetric inequalities. Various sufficient conditions for such inequalities are given. Some of them are new even in the classical log-Sobolev case. The idea behind many of these conditions is that measures with a non-convex potential may enjoy such functional inequalities provided they have a strong integrability property that balances the lack of convexity. In addition, several known criteria are recovered in a simple unified way by transportation methods and generalized to the Riemannian setting. The research of A.V. Kolesnikov was supported by RFBR 07-01-00536, DFG Grant 436 RUS 113/343/0 and GFEN 06-01-39003.