Fisher information of special functions and second-order differential equations

We investigate a basic question of analytic information theory, namely, the evaluation of the Fisher information and the relative Fisher information with respect to a non-negative function, for the probability distributions obtained by squaring the special functions of mathematical physics which are solutions of second-order differential equations. We obtain explicit expressions for these information-theoretic properties via the expectation values of the coefficients of the differential equation. We illustrate our approach for various nonrelativistic D-dimensional wavefunctions and some special functions of physicomathematical interest. Emphasis is made in the Nikiforov–Uvarov hypergeometric-type functions, which include and generalize the Hermite functions and the Gauss and Kummer hypergeometric functions, among others.