Information measures of hydrogenic systems, Laguerre polynomials and spherical harmonics

Fisher's information and Shannon's entropy are two complementary information measures of a probability distribution. Here, the probability distributions which characterize the quantum-mechanical states of a hydrogenic system are analyzed by means of these two quantities. These distributions are described in terms of Laguerre polynomials and spherical harmonics, whose characteristics are controlled by the three integer quantum numbers of the corresponding states. We have found the explicit expression for the Fisher information, and a lower bound for the Shannon entropy with the help of an isoperimetric inequality. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.