Interest in the study of wave equations of quantum mechanics has been considerably renewed due to their notable applications in measurement and information technologies. In particular, the entropic uncertainty relations, which provide alternatives to the ordinary Heisenberg uncertainty relation, have been investigated.^[1–39] Within the proposed entropies, the Shannon entropy possesses interesting features and is quite an appealing theoretical framework.^[1–3] The BBM entropic uncertainty relation, named after Beckner, Bialynicki–Birula, and Mycielski (see, Ref. [4]) is given by

The Shannon entropy has been studied for some quantum systems with exact analytical solutions. Sun et al.^[42] applied Shannon information entropies to a position-dependent mass Schrödinger problem with a hyperbolic well. They calculated the position and momentum information entropies for six low-lying states. Some interesting features of the information entropy densities were demonstrated and the BBM inequality was also tested.^[42] Yáñez-Navarro et al. have studied quantum information entropies for position-dependent-mass Schrödinger problems and have demonstrated the behaviors of the position and momentum information entropies. They showed the negative Shannon entropy exits for the probability densities that are highly localized and proved that the mass barrier determines the stability of the system.^[43] Rudnicki et al. studied the Shannon entropy-based uncertainty relation for D-dimensional central potentials and found that the resulting lower bound does not depend on the specific form of the potential since it only depends on the hyperangular quantum numbers.^[44] Song et al. studied the Shannon information entropy for an infinite circular well and tested the validity of the BBM inequality.^[45] Sun et al. studied the Shannon information entropy for a hyperbolic double-well potential and calculated the position and momentum information entropies for the lowest-lying states n = 1,2. They also observed that the position information entropy decreases with an increase in the potential strength but the momentum entropy is contrary to the position entropy. They checked the validity of BBM inequality as well.^[46] The particle in a symmetrical squared tangent potential and its Shannon information entropy were well analyzed in Ref. [47]. Massen applied Shannon information entropies in position and momentum space to various s–p and s–d shell nuclei using a correlated one-body density matrix and proposed a method to determine the correlation.^[48] Lin et al. used Shannon entropy to probe the nature of correlation effects. In addition, they considered the concept in connection with helium-like systems including positronium negative ion, hydrogen negative ion, helium and lithium positive ion.^[49] Dehesa et al. explicitly obtained the information entropy for a harmonic oscillator and the hydrogen atom in D dimensions. They showed how these entropies are related to entropies involving polynomials.^[50] Dehesa et al. studied the spreading of the quantum-mechanical probability cloud for the ground-state of the Morse and modified Pöschl-Teller potentials by means of global and local information-theoretic measures.^[51]

On the other hand the Kratzer potential is amongst the most attractive physical potentials as it contains an inverse square term besides the common Coulomb term which has well accounted for some observed phenomena in atomic, molecular and chemical physics.^[52–58] Before focusing on our work, we wish to address the interesting papers^[59–68] which discuss various aspects of the field.

The present article is organized as follows. In the next section, we give the quasi-exact solutions of the nonrelativistic Kratzer potential. In the third section, we first derive the wave functions in momentum space via the Fourier transform and then report the position and momentum information entropy densities, ρ_s (r) and γ_s (p), respectively. The (radial) probability densities ρ (r) and γ (p) are also discussed. We calculate S_ρ and S_γ for the low-lying one state n = 1 and the BBM inequality is shown to hold for these cases. Some concluding remarks are given in the last section.

For an arbitrary external potential V(r), the Schrödinger equation in spherical coordinates is written as

The transformation

Therefore, we find restrictions on potential parameters as

The position and momentum space information entropies for three-dimensional potentials can be calculated using Eq. (2). In general, explicit derivations of the information entropy are quite difficult. In particular the derivation of analytical expression for the S_ρ is almost impossible as shown in Refs. [43]–[48] To obtain the information entropy in momentum space, one needs to often use an integral transform, namely the Fourier transform in our case. We represent the position and momentum information entropy densities respectively for c = 0 and d = 0 by

Owing to the difficulty in calculating wave functions in momentum space, we only consider the lowest states n = 1. For simplicity, we study the n = 1 case in more detail. For the Fourier transform of n = 1 we only list the main results in Table 1. We can derive the corresponding representation of ℓ′ = 0 case through the Fourier transform^[71]

Fig. 1.

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	Fig. 1. Plots of the position space entropy densities for n = 1.

Fig. 2.

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	Fig. 2. Plots of the momentum space entropy densities for n = 1.

Fig. 3.

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	Fig. 3. Plots of the position space probability density for n = 1.

Fig. 4.

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	Fig. 4. Plots of the momentum space probability density for n = 1.

Table 1.

Table 1.

Table 1. Information entropies of the n = 1 eigenstates for ℓ′ = 0. . ɛ a Sρ Sγ Sρ + Sγ 3(1 + logπ) 1.75 3.5 2.91192 1.97741 4.88933 4.49145 2 4 2.74428 2.13472 4.879 4.49145 2.15 4.3 2.33109 2.21992 4.55101 4.49415

Table 1. Information entropies of the n = 1 eigenstates for ℓ′ = 0. .

In Figs. 5 and 6, we show the position information entropy S_γ and momentum space entropy S_ρ each as a function of parameter a respectively. We find that S_γ decreases with the increase of parameter a. Notice that the S_ρ decreases with the increase of parameter a. With increasing a, the mass barrier becomes narrower, thus the passing time becomes shorter and the system becomes more stable. The behavior of S_γ is contrary to that of S_ρ. With parameter a fixed, the S_ρ decreases with the energy level increasing. That is to say, when the energy of the system decreases, the quantum system becomes stable. It is notable that S_γ increases with the increase of parameter a.

Fig. 5.

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	Fig. 5. Plot of the position space entropy for n = 1.

Fig. 6.

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	Fig. 6. Plot of the momentum space entropy for n = 1.

In Table 1, we present the numerical results of the information entropies S_ρ and S_γ and their sum for the lowest states n = 1 with parameter a values of 3.5, 4, and 4.3 for ℓ′ = 0. It should be noted that the sum of the entropies, consistent with the BBM inequality, possesses the stipulated lower bound 3(1 + logπ).

We present the Shannon entropy for the position and momentum eigenstates of the Schrödinger equation with the Kratzer potential. The position S_ρ and momentum S_γ information entropies are calculated for n = 1. Particularly, the S_ρ entropy for the lowest state is derived analytically, and also some numerical calculations for S_γ are presented. We find that the position information entropy S_ρ decreases with the increase of parameter a, but the behavior of S_γ is contrary to that of the S_ρ. The influence of parameter a on the stability of the system is shown in detail. Some interesting features of the information entropy densities, ρ_s (r) and γ_s (p), are demonstrated via various figures and one table. The consistency with the BBM inequality is also verified for a number of states.