SHANNON ENTROPY OF THE WIGNER FUNCTION AND POSITION-MOMENTUM CORRELATION IN MODEL SYSTEMS

Abstract

Shannon entropies of the Wigner function are calculated for ground and excited stationary states of the Particle-In-A-Box and Harmonic Oscillator model systems and examined as a measure of the localization of the phase-space distribution. We show that their behavior is consistent with that of the sum of the position and momentum space entropies as a function of quantum number. Position-momentum correlation is then analyzed in these systems by defining mutual information between position and momentum variables. This mutual information yields non-zero values, in contrast to the quantum covariance, and increases with quantum number.