The Renyi, Shannon and Fisher spreading lengths of the classical or
hypergeometric orthogonal polynomials, which are quantifiers of their
distribution all over the orthogonality interval, are defined and investigated.
These information-theoretic measures of the associated Rakhmanov probability
density, which are direct measures of the polynomial spreading in the sense of
having the same units as the variable, share interesting properties: invariance
under translations and reflections, linear scaling and vanishing in the limit
that the variable tends towards a given definite value. The expressions of the
Renyi and Fisher lengths for the Hermite polynomials are computed in terms of
the polynomial degree. The combinatorial multivariable Bell polynomials, which
are shown to characterize the finite power of an arbitrary polynomial, play a
relevant role for the computation of these information-theoretic lengths.
Indeed these polynomials allow us to design an error-free computing approach
for the entropic moments (weighted L^q-norms) of Hermite polynomials and
subsequently for the Renyi and Tsallis entropies, as well as for the Renyi
spreading lengths. Sharp bounds for the Shannon length of these polynomials are
also given by means of an information-theoretic-based optimization procedure.
Moreover, it is computationally proved the existence of a linear correlation
between the Shannon length (as well as the second-order Renyi length) and the
standard deviation. Finally, the application to the most popular
quantum-mechanical prototype system, the harmonic oscillator, is discussed and
some relevant asymptotical open issues related to the entropic moments
mentioned previously are posed.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures. Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics
(2009), doi:10.1016/j.cam.2009.09.04