Eur. Phys. J. D (2015) 69: 283
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2015-60397-7

Regular Article

Shannon entropy as an indicator of atomic avoided crossings for Rydberg potassium atoms interacting with a static electric field

¹ Institute of Theoretical Physics, Hexi University, Zhangye 734000, P.R. China
² School of Physics and Electromechanical Engineering, Hexi University, Zhangye 734000, P.R. China

^a e-mail: hyl@hxu.edu.cn

Received: 7 July 2015
Received in final form: 19 October 2015
Published online: 17 December 2015

Abstract

We propose a method to calculate the positions of avoided crossings for Rydberg potassium in a static electric field by using Shannon entropy. Our method can be divided into two steps. At first we made a rough estimate of the range of the static electric field strength at which the given avoided crossings occur through strength dependence of the Shannon entropies for all the related states. Next, we obtained the position of the given avoided crossing by calculating the Shannon entropies intersection field strength for the two involved states. The Shannon entropies are calculated by using the one-electron wave functions derived from a well-established diagonalization method which is based on B-spline expansion technique and a parametric one-electron model potential. We have used this method to calculate a number of positions of both s and p states of avoided crossings for Rydberg potassium. The results are in excellent agreement with observed and other calculated results by using the ionization energies. Our study proves that Shannon entropy is an efficient information-theoretic parameter for characterization and prediction of avoided crossings of Rydberg potassium in the l-mixing region.