Analysis of Compton profile through information theory in H-like atoms inside impenetrable sphere

Abstract

Confinement of atoms inside various cavities has been studied for nearly eight decades. However, the Compton profile (CP) for such systems has not yet been investigated. Here we construct the CP for a H atom radially confined inside a hard spherical enclosure, as well as in a free condition. Some exact analytical relations for the CP’s of circular or nodeless states of free atoms is presented. By means of a scaling idea, this has been further extended to the study of a H-like atom trapped inside an impenetrable cavity. The accuracy of these constructed CPs has been confirmed by computing various momentum moments. Apart from that, several information theoretical measures, like Shannon entropy (S) and Onicescu energy (E) have been exploited to characterize these profiles. Exact closed-form expressions are derived for S and E using the ground state CP in free H-like atoms. A detailed study reveals that, increase in confinement inhibits the rate of dissipation of kinetic energy. At a fixed ℓ, this rate diminishes with a rise in n. However, at a certain n, this rate accelerates with progress in ℓ. Similar analysis on the respective free counterpart displays an exactly opposite trend as that in a confined system. However, in both free and confined environments, the CP generally gets broadened with rise in Z. Representative calculations are done numerically for low-lying states of the confined systems, taking two forms of position-space wave functions: (a) exact (b) highly accurate eigenfunctions through a generalized pseudospectral method. In essence, CPs are reported for confined H atoms (and isoelectronic series) and investigated adopting an information-theoretic framework.