UNIVERSAL PROPERTY OF THE INFORMATION ENTROPY IN ATOMS, NUCLEI AND ATOMIC CLUSTERS

The position- and momentum-space information entropies of the electron distributions of atomic clusters are calculated using a Woods-Saxon s ingle particle potential. The same entropies are also calculated for n uclear distributions according to the Skyrme parametrization of the nu clear mean field. It turns our that a similar functional form S = a b In N for the entropy as function of the number of particles N holds approximately for atoms, nuclei and atomic clusters. It is conjectured that this is a universal property of a many-fermion system in a mean field. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.