New characterizations of topological conditional entropy for actions of amenable groups

Existence of a measure with maximal entropy (that is, an invariant measure whose measure-theoretic entropy is equal to the topological entropy of the system) is an important subject in dynamical system theory. Weak expansiveness of the dynamical system, including h-expansiveness and asymptotic h-expansiveness, provides a non-trivial sufficient condition for existence of such measures. In this paper we give new characterizations for weak expansiveness of actions by amenable groups, by interpreting equivalently topological conditional entropy of such actions using either topological entropy of subsets in the sense of separated and spanning sets or ideas of Bowen’s dimensional entropy of subsets. Our results extend not only the well-known results about weak expansiveness by Bowen (1972, 1973), Marczyńska (1977) and Misiurewicz (1976) from single transformations to amenable group actions, but also a recent result relating topological entropy to Bowen’s dimensional entropy for amenable group actions which was proved first by Zheng and Chen (2016) using measure-theoretic methods and then re-proved by Dou and Zhang (2018) via purely topological tools.