Mutual information sums and relations with interaction energies in N-particle quantum systems.

Abstract

The sums of position- and momentum-space mutual information measures are used to examine the pairwise and higher-order statistical correlation in the ground states of N-particle coupled oscillators. Analytical expressions for these measures are shown to be related to the logarithmic interaction energies of these states, plus those of mirror states where the intensities of the one- and two-body potentials are interchanged, and the nature of the attractive or repulsive interaction is opposite to that in the original state. The measures separate the contributions from the interactions and those from the effective interactions due to marginalization into different terms. The pairwise mutual information sum is linearly related to the Shannon entropy sum in two particle systems, while the total correlation sum exhibits a similar relationship in three particle ones. In the latter instance, the interaction information sum can be related to entropy differences. This illustrates how entropy sums are connected to correlation measure sums in these systems. All measures approach zero with large N, when the magnitudes of the one- and two-body potentials are fixed. The pair mutual information and total correlation sums decay monotonically with N in the presence of an attractive potential and monotonically increase with a repulsive potential. On the other hand, the interaction information sum exhibits a minimum at small N, with an attractive potential. This is a consequence of the higher-order correlations governing behavior at smaller N while the pairwise ones dominate at larger N. Results are presented when the magnitude of the one-body potential is set to N.