Distance entropy of dynamical systems on noncompact-phase spaces (Q2479758)

Let \(X\) be a separable metric space not necessarily compact, and let \(f:X\to X\) be a continuous transformation. Taking into account the viewpoint of Hausdorff dimension, the authors improve Bowen's method to introduce a dynamical quantity, called distance entropy \(\text{ent}_H(f;Y)\) for \(f\) restricted on any given subset \(Y\) of \(X\). The concept of distance entropy is essentially different from Bowen's entropy \(h(f)\) [\textit{R.~Bowen}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 184(1973), 125--136 (1974; Zbl 0274.54030)]. The distance entropy has some basic properties similar to Hausdorff dimension and is beneficial to estimate Hausdorff dimension of a dynamical system. The authors show that 1) if \(f\) satisfies a Lipschitz condition with a Lipschitz constant \(l\) then \[ \text{ent}_H(f;Y)\leq\max\{0,HD(Y)\log l\}\quad\text{for all}Y\subset X; \] 2) if \(f\) is expanding with skewness \(\lambda\) then \[ \text{ent}_H(f;Y)\geq HD(Y)\log \lambda\quad\text{for all }Y\subset X, \] where \(HD(Y)\) stands for the Hausdorff dimension. The countable stability of the distance entropy \(\text{ent}_H\) proved in the paper generalizes the finite stability of Bowen's \(h\)-entropy [\textit{R.~Bowen}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 153, 401--414 (1971; Zbl 0212.29201)]. This implies that a continuous pointwise periodic map has the distance entropy zero. Finally, some examples are presented showing that the distance entropy describes the complexity for dynamical systems over a noncompact-phase space better than that of various other entropies.