Position and momentum information measures are evaluated for the ground state of the \emph{relativistic} hydrogen-like atoms. Consequences of the fact that the radial momentum operator is not self-adjoint are explicitly studied, exhibiting fundamental shortcomings of the conventional uncertainty measures in terms of the radial position and momentum variances. The Shannon and Rényi entropies, the Fisher information measure, as well as several related information measures, are considered as viable alternatives. Detailed results on the onset of relativistic effects for low nuclear charges, and on the extreme relativistic limit, are presented. The relativistic position density decays exponentially at large
r, but is singular at the origin. Correspondingly, the momentum density decays as an inverse power of
p. Both features yield divergent Rényi entropies away from a finite vicinity of the Shannon entropy. While the position space information measures can be evaluated analytically for both the nonrelativistic and the relativistic hydrogen atom, this is not the case for the relativistic momentum space. Some of the results allow interesting insight into the significance of recently evaluated Dirac-Fock vs. Hartree-Fock complexity measures for many-electron neutral atoms.
Phase-space versions of quantum mechanics -- from Wigner's original distribution to modern discrete-qudit constructions -- represent some states with negative quasi-probabilities. Conventional Shannon and Rényi entropies become complex-valued in this setting and lose their operational meaning. Building on the axiomatic treatments of Rényi (1961) and Daróczy (1963), we develop a conservative extension that applies to signed finite phase spaces and identify a single admissible entropy family, which we call signed Rényi
α-entropy (for a free parameter
α≥0). The obvious signed Shannon candidate is ruled out because it violates extensivity. We prove four results that bolster the usefulness of the new measure. (i) It serves as a witness of the presence of cancellation, detecting the coexistence of positive and negative weight in a signed measure. (ii) For
α>1, it is Schur-concave, delivering the intuitive property that mixing increases entropy (iii) The same parametric family obeys a quantum H-theorem, namely, that under de-phasing dynamics entropy cannot decrease. (iv) The
2-entropy is conserved under discrete Moyal-bracket dynamics, mirroring conservation of von Neumann entropy under unitary evolution on Hilbert space. We also comment on interpreting the Rényi order parameter as an inverse temperature. Overall, we believe that our investigation provides good evidence that our axiomatically derived signed Rényi entropy may be a useful addition to existing entropy measures employed in quantum information, foundations, and thermodynamics.
In this paper, we generalize the notion of Shannon's entropy power to the Rényi-entropy setting. With this, we propose generalizations of the de Bruijn identity, isoperimetric inequality, or Stam inequality. This framework not only allows for finding new estimation inequalities, but it also provides a convenient technical framework for the derivation of a one-parameter family of Rényi-entropy-power-based quantum-mechanical uncertainty relations. To illustrate the usefulness of the Rényi entropy power obtained, we show how the information probability distribution associated with a quantum state can be reconstructed in a process that is akin to quantum-state tomography. We illustrate the inner workings of this with the so-called "cat states", which are of fundamental interest and practical use in schemes such as quantum metrology. Salient issues, including the extension of the notion of entropy power to Tsallis entropy and ensuing implications in estimation theory, are also briefly discussed.