A Study of Strong Confinement Regions Using Informational Entropy

Abstract

We present an informational study of a spherically confined hydrogen atom, a hydrogenic ion confined in a strongly coupled plasma, a spherically confined harmonic oscillator, and a particle confined in a cage. For this, we have implemented a numerical procedure to obtain information entropies of these confined quantum systems. The procedure is based on the variational formalism that uses the finite element method (FEM) for the expansion of the wavefunction in terms of local base functions. Such a study is carried out in order to analyze what happens in the rigorous confinement regime. In particular, we have shown that the effects of the interaction potential is no longer important for rigorous confinements and the studied systems start to behave just like an electron confined by a impenetrable spherical cage. When possible, we compared our results with those published in the literature.

Keywords

• Shannon entropy
• confined quantum systems
• finite element method