Needle Decompositions in Riemannian Geometry

The localization technique from convex geometry is generalized to the setting of Riemannian manifolds whose Ricci curvature is bounded from below. In a nutshell, our method is based on the following observation: When the Ricci curvature is nonnegative, log-concave measures are obtained when conditioning the Riemannian volume measure with respect to a geodesic foliation that is orthogonal to the level sets of a Lipschitz function. The Monge mass transfer problem plays an important role in our analysis.