The Fried average entropy and slow entropy for actions of higher rank abelian groups (Q484091)

A key feature of (for example) \(\mathbb Z^d\)-actions (in both measure-theoretic and topological settings) is that if individual elements of the action have finite entropy then the \(d\)-dimensional entropy of the whole action vanishes unless \(d=1\). Thus, for example, any smooth action on a manifold of a locally compact compactly generated group will have zero entropy unless the group is a compact extension of \(\mathbb Z\). Thus it is of interest to find entropy-like invariants that balance desirable global properties (for example, independence of the choice of generators for the group action) against desirable local properties (for example, being informative even in settings where individual elements of the action have finite entropy). Here two approaches are studied in the setting of smooth \(\mathbb Z^k\)-actions of maximal rank (that is, on \((k+1)\)-manifolds) for \(k\geq2\): the average entropy introduced by \textit{D. Fried} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 87, 111--116 (1983; Zbl 0518.28014)] and the slow entropy introduced by the first author and \textit{J.-P. Thouvenot} [Ann. Inst. Henri Poincaré, Probab. Stat. 33, No. 3, 323--338 (1997; Zbl 0884.60009)]. It is shown that in fixed rank each of these invariants determines the other, and that the values may be expressed in terms of regulators in associated number fields. This gives rise to two striking outcomes: the set of values taken on is countable, and the values when positive (under mild assumptions) are bounded below by a positive quantity that grows with the dimension, exponentially in the first case and linearly in the second.