Entanglement in the<i>XY</i>spin chain

Abstract

We consider the ground state of the XY model on an infinite chain at zero temperature. Following Bennett, Bernstein, Popescu, and Schumacher we use entropy of a sub-system as a measure of entanglement. Vidal, Latorre, Rico and Kitaev conjectured that von Neumann entropy of a large block of neighboring spins approaches a constant as the size of the block increases. We evaluated this limiting entropy as a function of anisotropy and transverse magnetic field. We used the methods based on integrable Fredholm operators and Riemann-Hilbert problem. The entropy is singular at phase transitions.