Entanglement and Quantum Phase Transition in Low Dimensional Spin Systems

Entanglement of the ground states in $XXZ$ and dimerized Heisenberg spin chains and in two-leg spin ladder is analyzed by using spin-spin concurrence and the entanglement entropy between a selected block of spins and the rest of the system. Quantum critical points as well as phase boundaries can be in some cases identified straightforwardly by analyzing the local extreme of the entanglement. We show that various subsystem partitions may provide complementary description of a quantum phase diagram.