Information measures of hydrogenic systems, Laguerre polynomials and spherical harmonics (Q1779442)

The authors continue their study on the properties of the Fisher transformation and Shannon entropy that are two complementary information measures of a probability distribution. This paper analyzes the probability distributions characterizing the quantum-mechanical states of a hydrogenic system by means of the measures of the Fisher information and the Shannon entropy defined by \[ I(\rho ):=\int _ {\mathbb R^3}\frac {\overline\nabla (\bar \rho r )} {\rho (\bar r )}\,d\bar r, \quad \text{and } \quad S(\rho ):=-\int _{\mathbb R^3} \rho (\bar r)\ln (\bar r) \,d \bar r, \] respectively, and where the function \(\rho (\bar r)\;\) depends on the three integer quantum numbers over the whole space. The authors have found an explicit expression for the Fisher information by means of the extensive use of the algebraic properties of Laguerre polynomials, the associated Legendre functions of first kind and spherical harmonics. For the Shannon entropy, the integrals of Legendre and Gegenbauer polynomials involved are difficult to compute but an interesting lower bound is given.