On the entropy norm on \(\text{Ham}(S^2)\) (Q2022919)

Let \(S^2\) be the standard 2-sphere and \(Ham(S^2)\) the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of \(S^2\). There exist several unbounded bi-invariant metrics on \(\mathrm{Ham}(S^2)\). The most notable are the Hofer metric, the autonomous metric and the entropy metric. Let \(\mathrm{Ent}(S^2)\subset\mathrm{Ham}(S^2)\) be the set of diffeomorphisms of topological entropy-zero. We recall that the topological entropy \(h_{\mathrm{top}}(f)\) measures the total exponential complexity of the orbit structure of \(f\) in terms of the maximal numbers of finite-time orbits \(O_f(x,n)=\{x,f(x),\dots, f^n(x)\}\) that are distinguishable. This set \(\mathrm{Ent}(S^2)\) is conjugation invariant and it generates \(\mathrm{Ham}(S^2)\). In other words, each diffeomorphism in \(\mathrm{Ham}(S^2)\) is a finite product of entropy-zero diffeomorphisms. One may ask for a minimal decomposition and this question leads to the concept of the entropy norm which we define by \(\|f\|_{\mathrm{Ent}}:= \min\{k\in \mathbb{N} \mid f = h_1\cdots h_k, h_i \in\mathrm{Ent}(S^2)\}\). The entropy norm is conjugation-invariant since \(\mathrm{Ent}(S^2)\) is. The associated bi-invariant metric is denoted by \(d_{\mathrm{Ent}}\). The main result of this paper is the following Theorem: For each \(m\in \mathbb{N}\) there exists a bi-Lipschitz embedding \(\mathbb{Z}^m \to \left(\mathrm{Ham}(S^2),d_{\mathrm{Ent}}\right)\), where \(\mathbb{Z}^m\) is endowed with the \(l^1\)-metric. In particular, the above result implies that \(\mathrm{Ham}(S^2)\) equipped with either the entropy or the autonomous metric is not a hyperbolic space.