Since the inception of modern physics, scientists have described the physical world through principles of least action, characterizing systems in terms of their behavior under “vertical” perturbations or variations. Inspired by the mathematical field of optimal transport (OT), recent years have seen a surge of interest from the physics community in a new type of perturbation: “horizontal” variations in the domain, in which a ground state is modeled as a measure and its distribution is rearranged via push forwards through transport maps.

This workshop will bring together international experts in cosmology, particle physics, quantum field theory, general relativity, and OT to examine how tools from OT can be applied to new problems in physics and how the development of physically principled methods inspires mathematical, statistical, and computational innovations within OT itself.

This workshop will include a poster session; a request for posters will be sent to registered participants in advance of the workshop.