Entanglement in the XY spin chain

We consider the entanglement in the ground state of the XY model of an infinite chain. Following Bennett, Bernstein, Popescu and Schumacher, we use the entropy of a sub-system as a measure of entanglement. Vidai, Latorre, Rico and Kitaev have conjectured that the von Neumann entropy of a large block of neighbouring spins approaches a constant as the size of the block increases. We evaluate this limiting entropy as a function of anisotropy and transverse magnetic field. We use the methods based on the integrable Fredholm operators and the Riemann-Hilbert approach. It is shown how the entropy becomes singular at the phase transition points.