Surprisal Analysis-Based Compaction of Entangled Molecular States of Maximal Entropy

An attosecond optical pulse can entangle coherently related states of different characters, such as electronic and vibrational, in a molecular system. Using a quantum information theoretic approach, we explicitly define and discuss the surprisal of such a system in the maximal entropy formalism and identify the constraints and their conjugate Lagrange multipliers. Surprisal analysis shows how these constraints become fewer and simpler in the sudden approximation of the dynamics, a limit often valid for an ultrafast excitation. The optically accessible lower electronic states of N₂ are used as a numerical example to show the compaction of the dynamics from On2 down to On constraints, where n is the number of vibronic states. The von Neumann entropy is used to confirm the fidelity of the compaction.