Jensen-Shannon divergence: a multipurpose distance for statistical and quantum mechanics

P.W. LAMBERTI; A. MAJTEY; M. MADRID; M. PEREYRA

Proceedings of the XV Conference on Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics

American Institute of Physics

Año: 2007; p. 32 - 37

Many problems of statistical and quantum mechanics can be established in terms of a distance; in the first case the distance is usually defined between probability distributions; in the second one, between quantum states. The present work is devoted to review the main properties of a distance known as the Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD) in its classical and quantum version. We present two examples of application of this distance: in the first one we use it as a quantifiers of the stochastic resonance phenomenon in ion channels; in the second one we use the JSD to propose a geometrical view of entanglement for two qubits states.