Continuity Equation for the Flow of Fisher Information in Wave Scattering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a continuity equation for Fisher information in wave scattering, demonstrating that scattered waves carry conserved, locally defined information about objects, with experimental verification at microwave frequencies.

Contribution

It formulates a general continuity equation for Fisher information in wave fields and experimentally verifies it in complex environments, advancing understanding of information flow in wave scattering.

Findings

Fisher information density and flux are conserved and satisfy a continuity equation.

Experimental measurements confirm the theoretical Fisher information flux predictions.

The framework enables new approaches to tracking and designing information flow in complex systems.

Abstract

Using waves to explore our environment is a widely used paradigm, ranging from seismology to radar technology, and from bio-medical imaging to precision measurements. In all of these fields, the central aim is to gather as much information as possible about an object of interest by sending a probing wave at it and processing the information delivered back to the detector. Here, we demonstrate that an electromagnetic wave scattered at an object carries locally defined and conserved information about all of the object's constitutive parameters. Specifically, we introduce here the density and flux of Fisher information for very general types of wave fields and identify corresponding sources and sinks of information through which all these new quantities satisfy a fundamental continuity equation. We experimentally verify our theoretical predictions by studying a movable object embedded inside a disordered environment and by measuring the corresponding Fisher information flux at microwave frequencies. Our results provide a new understanding of the generation and propagation of information and open up new possibilities for tracking and designing the flow of information even in complex environments.