Pairwise entanglement and critical behavior of an anisotropic ferrimagnetic spin chain

We studied the quantum phase transition revealed to occur in the ferrimagnetic mixed-spin (S,s)=(1,1/2) chain with positive crystal-field anisotropy D under an external magnetic field by using concepts from quantum information theory such as pairwise entanglement and purity, incorporated into the density matrix renormalization group algorithm. In this system, a magnetization plateau appears at 1/3 of the saturation magnetization for all values of D except for a critical value Dc where it vanishes. We obtained this value Dc=1.11445±0.00065 within the thermodynamic limit as local minima of the pairwise entanglement and the purity. Moreover, using this procedure we were able to investigate the second-order (or continuous) character of the quantum phase transition.