Shannon Information Entropy in Position Space for the Ground and Singly Excited States of Helium with Finite Confinements

Shannon Entropy in Configuration Space for Ni-Like Isoelectronic Sequence

Discrete Shannon entropy was introduced in view of the mathematical properties of multiconfiguration methods and then used to interpret the information in atomic states expressed by the multiconfiguration Dirac–Hartree–Fock wavefunction for Ni-like isoelectronic sequence. Moreover, the relationship between the concepts, including sudden change of Shannon entropy, information exchange, eigenlevel anticrossing, and strong configuration interaction, was clarified by induction on the basis of the present calculation of the energy structure for Ni-like isoelectronic sequence. It was found that there is an interesting connection between the change of Shannon entropies and eigenlevel anticrossings, along with the nuclear charge Z, which is helpful to conveniently locate the position of eigenlevel anticrossings and information exchanging and understand them from the point of view of information, besides the traditional physical concepts. Especially, it is concluded that in a given configuration space eigenlevel anticrossing is a sufficient and necessary condition for the sudden change of Shannon entropy, which is also a sufficient condition for information exchange.

Shannon, Rényi, Tsallis Entropies and Onicescu Information Energy for Low-Lying Singly Excited States of Helium

Knowledge of the electronic structures of atomic and molecular systems deepens our understanding of the desired system. In particular, several information-theoretic quantities, such as Shannon entropy, have been applied to quantify the extent of electron delocalization for the ground state of various systems. To explore excited states, we calculated Shannon entropy and two of its one-parameter generalizations, Rényi entropy of order α and Tsallis entropy of order α , and Onicescu Information Energy of order α for four low-lying singly excited states (1s2s 1 S e , 1s2s 3 S e , 1s3s 1 S e , and 1s3s 3 S e states) of helium. This paper compares the behavior of these three quantities of order 0.5 to 9 for the ground and four excited states. We found that, generally, a higher excited state had a larger Rényi entropy, larger Tsallis entropy, and smaller Onicescu information energy. However, this trend was not definite and the singlet–triplet reversal occurred for Rényi entropy, Tsallis entropy and Onicescu information energy at a certain range of order α .